Hello hello! So I’m trying to broaden my culinary horizon right now, things have gotten a bit stale since I have a mild case of ARFID and tend to fall back on safe foods (protein bars, fruit pureés, burritos) when I don’t keep an eye on my diet. Ideally I’m looking for something that’s healthy and reqires little prep. And it should be obtainable in Germany. But if the title speaks to you in any other way I’m interested to hear your thoughts anyway.
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How do you feel about oatmeal? It’s healthy and has much more potential for adding flavors to than most people ever consider. It’s pretty neutral and makes a good canvas for other flavors.
For example, you can add cheese to make something like a healthier Mac and cheese. The starch makes it sort of creamy.
But you might want to upgrade from rolled oats to steel cut oats. You get much more “tooth” to your oatmeal and not just mush. Unless the mush is what you like. You can also use whole oats for even more “tooth”.
Sumac. Put that shit on your winter baked potatos peeps, you’re welcome
hay.
Hay gurl
Rice cooker saved my life. I add whatever I have lying around that doesn’t require cooking like ham, pickles, canned veggies or fruits, fresh or dried fruits, etc, and if I’m feeling fancy I might boil eggs. Plus mushroom sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, or soy sauce. If you can find black rice in asian supermarkets it’s even better.
Green beans!
Spices! Smoked paprika, curry sauce and spices, turmeric, southwest seasoning, garlic everything!
Gochujang paste - Korean fermented red pepper paste. It has a really tasty, slightly spicy flavor, that tastes great in soup/ ramen or coating noddles/pasta.
Rule of thumb: whatever amount of a spice a recipe calls for, double it.
I did that once with bay leaves, that soup was…so mildly off.
I have absolutely no idea what difference bay leaves make. I keep putting them in things, mainly due to blind allegiance to the recipe, but if you put a gun to my head and demanded that I describe the taste you’d just have to shoot me 'cause I wouldn’t be able to it.
(The fact that the leaves are too tough to eat by themselves to understand their flavor doesn’t help either. Maybe I should try grinding one into a fine powder or something.)
In normal amounts, they add a sort of pleasing background note. They mostly help other seasonings feel more rounded.
When placing a bunch in, it tastes…off. Bad? Strong in a bad way. Overwhelming other tastes.
Soups. Find Cooks Illustrated Best Soups cookbook. Learn to make and can your own broth. It doesn’t change everything but it changes a lot.
Rutabaga. It’s a root vegetable that you cook similar to parsnips or turnips. A bit of a nutty, earthy flavor. Really good mashed with a splash of cream and a grating of fresh nutmeg.
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lentils! chick peas! beans! legumes in general, they are great! you can integrate them into anything…
(ie. cook a bunch of lentils to eat warm with whatever veggies you can steam… but leftovers the next day are turned into a salad, etc. )
Any type of bean. You can make dips, chili, put them in rice, and they are really healthy.
I love beans! The burritos I make usually contain some baked tofu and onions, brown rice and refried as well as whole beans. They’re like at least 70% bean 😄 Best way to get some protein in when you prefer plant based foods.
If you like beans, the pressure cooker is your friend, and the best one is German: Fissler.
The recipe from ‘Jose el Cook’ on YT for Arroz Rojo is really good.
Added kidney beans in the riceToo bad that reheating in the microwave makes it a bit too dry and it needs some protein which is also hard to reheat at work.
For a healthy and affordable diet: beans, rice, bread, collards, kale, mackerel, salmon, sardines, raisins, oatmeal, almonds, and chicken.
Cotton sheets here. So, I guess the food I’m sleeping on is long sugar chains?
Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.
Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn’t. It’s fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.
People like to talk about how umami’s spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.
So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn’t help that it isn’t marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it’s more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it’s called nutritional yeast.
One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don’t measure for it, it’s just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It’s mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.
You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Nutritional yeast is great for scrambled tofu. You can of course season scrambled tofu however you like, but for one block of tofu (quite forgiving in terms of quantities, I think this will work well for anywhere between 200g to 400g of firm or extra-firm tofu) I do:
- Generous bunch of nutritional yeast. Like a good pinch between all of your fingertips.
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
- 1/4 tsp ground black pepper (you can up it to 1/2 tsp if you prefer; I used to do 1/2 tsp then I think I got oversensitive to it so halved it)
- sprinkle of salt
- Add dried parsley at the end as a garnish
Keep in mind I don’t make any attempt to make mine taste like eggs. If you want scrambled tofu as an egg substitute then you could leave out the cumin (which gives it a more curry flavour) and add stuff like garlic powder, onion powder, and black rock salt at the end (add black rock salt at the very end when it’s off the heat, otherwise it will lose its eggy flavour). But personally I prefer a more curry flavour than an eggy flavour!
Nutritional yeast also works well to top avocado toast with. I do toasted sourdough, smashed avocado mixed with lemon juice, nutritional yeast sprinkled on top, then toasted sesame seeds sprinkled on top of that.
I’ve eaten roasted cauliflower with parmesan before and it was delicious so I’m gonna have to give that one a go!
the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami
This is absurd. Are you claiming that western peoples never ate meat? Mushrooms? Etc?
No, they clearly meant that umami wasn’t recognized as the fifth taste until recently.
But never mind that; I just want to chime in that garum (fish sauce) has been a thing in the west since ancient Roman times, if not earlier.
I recommend the Tasting History videos about it, BTW:
I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That’s absurd, it’s right there to see.
Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.
Before that, there wasn’t really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means “meat like” without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.
I don’t know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was “viral” in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective “ohhhhhh! That’s what I’ve been experiencing”, and the word got adopted. Now it’s a part of the collective lexicon.
No I think what they mean was that we did not discover (or the Japanese, rather) that we have separate receptors on our tongues for umami until fairly recently. We knew what it was, but didn’t have a proper name for it.
Are things like Taro and Cassava readily available in Germany? If so then I’d recommend Sop Sop.
2 tbsp celery salt
I think something is lost in translation because holy shit that’s a lot of salt.
but 4 teaspoons equal 1 Australian tablespoon, while in the U.S. and elsewhere 3 teaspoons equal 1 tablespoon
Oh God, that’s even worse.
Celery salt is made from celery seed and salt. It’s not as salty as table salt: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-celery-salt/
It’s a big dish as there’s 2kg of carbohydrates there and celery salt isn’t as strong flavoured as sea salt.
Yes you can get all of that at Asian grocery stores. Sounds interesting, never heard of it before.
Since you’re talking about Germany: Tofu has been unfairly demonized here (maybe because it can serve as a meat substitute).
It is a great source of nutrients and protein. It can be prepared in many different ways. It is environmentally friendly, can be conveniently stored and has a relatively long shelf life.
Tofu has been unfairly demonized here
Could you give me some more context on this? Is it the usual “phytoestrogen will make you a girl” or agricultural industry propaganda?
I feel like the EU in general has been quite pro-animal agriculture (for example plant-based milk can’t be sold as “milk”), but how is it in Germany specifically?
Most of the experience, including your examples, is not specific to Germany. The notion that tofu is not for “real men” can be seen in other meat-heavy societies. Just like the idea that tofu is not a filling meal. In pop culture, it is often associated with weak traits (e.g. “soy boy”), and described as tasting bad or bland in general.
In Germany, a special permit was required until the 1990s to produce certain types of tofu. If you offer people something with tofu, many still turn up their noses or laugh because they think you’re joking. I don’t notice this as much with any other widely available food.
There is also far too much discussion about whether something can be called tofu sausage, tofu burger or tofu butter. But I think here we’ve passed the low point and common sense is slowly gaining ground.
Sometimes you still come across the false claims that tofu raises estrogen levels and that the rainforest is cut down to produce it.
Thank you for the insight. Yeah, I expected the “cultural” talking points to be pretty similar across the western countries, including Poland, where I live.
The vast majority of pro-meat arguments I hear are based on these conservative ideas mixed with a large dose of protectionism, so any progress tends to be very slow.
But I think here we’ve passed the low point and common sense is slowly gaining ground.
This topic got ridiculously politicized, so hopefully once people get tired of the debate they will be more willing to consider the economic/health/environment/etc. aspects, not just cultural.
See, this is why I come to the comments: To pick up tiny little bits of interesting cultural knowledge.
A family member said they disliked it because of it being gummy.
Might also be a brand thing because silky tofu from the asian store was just silky but tasteless and would need some type of marinade.Tofu tastes like soy! It’s a very mild flavour but I can definitely taste and smell it in tofu and soy milk. I suppose people who are not used to eating tofu might think it has no flavour at all, but as someone who’s eaten tofu their whole life, I can definitely recognise soy as a flavour. Just a very subtle one.
Maybe it was the brand/dish I used it (once) with didnt make it very obvious.
oh well. Maybe next time :)I think people who didn’t grow up eating tofu, or just haven’t eaten a lot of tofu, may easily believe that tofu has no flavour. Or maybe if your nose/tongue is just less sensitive. I can most easily smell it when tofu is frying in a pan, personally. Like I said, it’s really subtle, and easily overpowered.
I haven’t tried tofu many different ways, but I worked at a tex-mex restaurant in high school and I’ve enjoyed it the way they made it ever since. Squeeze the excess water out, dice it, marinate it in the same marinade you would use for tex-mex steak, saute it, and serve it in tacos or burritos or whatever.
