We Vegetarians
It is rarely about missing meat. It is about the two things meat supplied automatically and vegetables have to be given deliberately.
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It is rarely about missing meat. It is about the two things meat supplied automatically and vegetables have to be given deliberately.
People who cook a vegetarian meal and find it unsatisfying usually diagnose it as an absence: there was no meat, so it was missing something. That is close to right and imprecise about what. Meat contributes two things to a dish almost without effort. It browns, generating a large quantity of savoury compounds, and it carries fat, which distributes flavour and produces the mouthfeel that makes food feel substantial. Remove it without replacing either and the result is thin, however good the vegetables.
Both are available without meat and neither happens by accident. Browning requires a hot enough pan, enough space so that the food sears rather than steams, and the patience to leave it alone. Vegetables release a great deal of water, so a crowded pan produces boiled mushrooms with a disappointing grey exterior, which is the single most common failure in home vegetarian cooking and is entirely a matter of pan size and heat.
The difference between dried and tinned is real and so is the convenience.
We Vegetarians is about cooking without meat as a daily practice: the technique that makes vegetable dishes satisfying, how to build meals that are not organised around an absence, and how to cook this way on a weeknight.
The editorial position is that most disappointing vegetarian food is a technique problem rather than an ingredient problem, that browning and seasoning are undersupplied far more often than anything else, and that the substitute product is one useful approach rather than the only one.