Vegetarians: what sort of fats and broths do you use when adapting recipes?

Question

Never having tasted bacon or chicken, I admit to not having a great handle on what the original purpose of the 'bacon fat' or 'chicken stock' called for in a recipe was. Butter and vegetable stock still, in almost all cases, make the recipe come out decently, but I'm curious as to what other people use.

Answer 1

For me it depends on the recipe and how close I want to get to the taste of the meat based recipe. General purpose (as others have said) is veggie stock and Olive oil. Off the top 'o my head here's my list of subs.

poultry stock = Telma vegetable soup cube
meat stocks = Better than bouillon vegetable or mushroom base
fish stock = white miso or seaweed broth
bacon fat = Organic Bac*uns gently sauteed in Olive oil (to flavor the oil)
schmaltz (chicken fat) = EarthBalance
solid animal fats = green label Crisco

any others you curious about? just ask

Answer 2

I use what you use--- or depending on how I want it to taste, maybe a different oil---like toasted sesame oil, olive oil, etc.
There are some vegetarian "gravy" substitutes that can give some flavor instead of chicken stock--- Basically it is a few spices like ground coriander, etc. and nutritional yeast.
Many recipes, I've found, can be easily adapted--- or the meat product or eggs (even in baking) just left out entirely.

Answer 3

White or brown (when you make a white stock of any type, you are starting with raw products, while with a brown stock, you roast the products to caramelize the exterior and add taste) veggie stock. Or mushroom stock. Sometimes I'll use a faux stock mix. It depends on what type of flavors I'm looking for. I chose to be a vegetarian and then a vegan, in my 40's.

When it comes to fats and oils, I use olive or canola oils for cooking and more flavorful oils such as sesame oil for seasoning purposes.

Answer 4

For most of our soups, just because it's easy and tasty, we add miso and nutritional yeast to our soups after they are cooked and cooled a bit. Sometimes, if it's rice congee for instance, we just add a little ancient sea salt (sea salt from the underground mine). If we make a quick broth soup, we throw in one or all: ginger, miso, nutritional yeast, seaweed, garlic.

Those are the main flavourants we use for soups. We keep our ginger frozen and and take it out and grate it with a find grater. This keeps it fresh and lasting much longer. There are lots of different seaweeds (or sea vegetables) and all have a different flavour.

Lastly we also use mushrooms. All those dried mushrooms at the Asian markets are great, especially shiitake.

For thickening we use water-chestnut powder -- works very well. Just mix well with a separate bit of water (smushing with fingers works best) till dissolved, then add to soup (or watery stir fry) to thicken.

I think all this modern stuff like adding butter, fat, milk, cream, etc. to soup is silly. It takes away from the flavour of the ingredients.

Answer 5

Try miso (Japanese fermented bean paste) in hot water instead of chicken broth. The pale kind tastes like chicken, the dark kind tastes like beef.

Answer 6

merely placed the veg in a pan of simmering water, upload slightly salt and pepper to flavor, and wait 'til all is smooth. you may blitz slightly of it to thicken, in case you want. Veg. soup would not desire inventory cubes in case you employ sparkling veg. and commence by frying onions, ginger and slightly garlic. i have not used inventory cubes in 40 years., they're frequently salt and msg, besides. (i'm not a veggie, only a strong prepare dinner).

Answer 7

I also use veggie broth. Krogers has a pretty good veggie broth.

Answer 8

I use veggie broth or stock for broth.

Answer 9

olive oil