Vegan Recipes

I confess, I have a weakness of the soul. A dark longing stalks me, a desire I can never satisfy and yet one I desire all the same.

It’s seafood, of all sorts except white fish. Particularly smoked salmon, prawns, sea bugs, and mussels.

I consider myself a relatively competent home cook, many people express delight at my food and find reasons why I should do the cooking for events. Yet I fumble at the edges of understanding when it comes to my dark lust for something that tastes like the seafood I used to love.

The extent of my learnings thusfar are essentially that kelp (kombu particularly, which amusingly is illegal in my county to import as food. Fancy that) and salt and msg sort of approximates a vague ocean character when used as a stock base and soforth. Or ground and added to a dish.

So I’d be really keen if we could exchange what we know on hitting similar notes in food. I’m not of the school of thought that wants things to sub one to one, for example while crumbed, fried, tofu doesn’t taste anything like schnitzel it can serve a similar roll in a dish which is otherwise appropriately flavoured. Or while a slurry of caper juice, msg, lemon zest, salt and olive oil does not in any sense represent an anchovy using it in sauces or dressings in place of the poor dears fleshes out the character in a similar manner.

So please, share what you’ve learned! Here is my fumbling at smoked salmon similarities: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CC1wJx0RKmYM__-TTcg9FR-xcM5wHp-rxJpJlhRYAGw/edit?usp=sharing summarised:

Rough ratios:

120 mL soy sauce
75 mL neutral oil - vegetable oil
150 mL water
70 mL lemon juice
45 mL kelp buds ground
7.5 mL liquid smoke
2.5 mL MSG
20 mL caper juice
10 mL maple syrup

as a marinade for some base. Salt roasted carrot is woefully inadequate (a popular suggestion from people high on copium) and I would suggest instead maybe daikon leached of flavour in water and coloured with some beet juice?