Thrift Week 2020, Day 4: Three types of vegan dishes

When I decided to embark on this vegan challenge, I decided I wanted to incorporate a variety of types of vegan food. As Brian put it, there are three major kinds of vegan dishes:

1. Naturally plant-based dishes. These don't contain any animal products, so you don't need to do anything to them to make them vegan. Example: the Pasta Romesco that was our Recipe of the Month last September, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Vegan adaptations. These are dishes that normally contain some kind of animal product, so you make them vegan by leaving it out. Example: You take a recipe for chicken-vegetable stir-fry and simply leave out the chicken. Replacing the chicken with tofu — a different protein source, rather than a straight-up "substitute" for chicken — would also count.
3. Vegan substitutions. These are recipes where the meat, or cheese, or dairy is an integral part of the dish, and simply taking it out wouldn't work. So instead, you deliberately replace it with a plant-based substitute, like the Gimme Lean beef we use in our chili.

Most of the vegan foods we eat fall into categories 1 and 2. So, to make sure we'd also do some of category 3, I purchased a container of seitan on our last trip to the Whole Earth Center. This "wheat meat" is said to make a good substitute for chicken, so I thought we could try it out in one of our favorite chicken recipes and see how well it worked. It would be like a trial run for the vegan seitan tenders I've contemplated making: a way to put this substitution to the test without all the prep work.

The seitan was a little bit pricey: $4.69 for a 12-ounce package, which works out to $6.25 per pound. That's more than three times as much as the $1.99 we're used to paying for free-range chicken legs at Trader Joe's, but it's less than the $6.99 we'd pay there for free-range, skinless, boneless chicken breasts, and these ready-cut seitan pieces are at least as easy to work with as those are. So, to make the most use of their convenient form, Brian decided to use some in a recipe we've made and enjoyed before: chicken pot pie.

To adapt this recipe, however, he had to make a few more changes than simply substituting seitan chunks for chicken chunks. The way he used to make this pie was to roast the chicken first and make one meal out of that, then save the pan drippings to make gravy, along with the leftover meat. So he had to figure out how to make a flavorful gravy without these drippings, and how to thicken it without using any milk. And, on top of that, he had to make the pastry for the crust without using butter. So this recipe ended up requring not one, but three substitutions for animal products: the chicken itself, the chicken drippings, the milk, and the butter.

All in all, Brian put enough work into adapting this recipe that I think it should qualify as an entirely new dish, and our first Vegan Recipe of the Month. Here it is in full:

VEGAN SEITAN POT PIE

1. For the filling, dice 2 small potatoes and 3 small carrots, and chop 1 medium leek and 4 oz. mushrooms. Sauté in a pan until softened, then add about 3 oz. seitan, cut into small pieces, and 1/4 tsp. salt.
2. For the gravy, combine 2 Tbsp. flour and 2 Tbsp. water in a small bowl. Melt 1 Tbsp. plant-based butter (Brian used Country Crock) in a pan. Stir in 1 cup vegetable broth (he used 3/4 tsp. Penzey's vegetable soup base dissolved in 1 cup water). Blend in the flour-and-water mixture and stir until thickened.
3. For the crust, make a pastry dough of 1 cup flour, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 5 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. plant-based butter. (Note: when Brian made this, he was scaling down the recipe from the one he'd used in the past, and he made a math error that resulted in his using only half this amount of the plant butter. The pastry actually tasted fine this way, but it stuck to the pan. So you could probably get away with using less than this full amount. Try 4 Tbsp. to start, and then adjust as needed.) Divide the dough in half and roll it out to make two crusts.
4. Assemble the pie. Line an 8-inch pie plate with the first crust, load in the filling and gravy, and top with the second crust, cutting off the excess pastry and crimping to seal the edges. Bake in a 400°F oven for about 35 minutes.

The finished pie was certainly nice to look at, golden and crisp, and the smell was appetizing. The crust, as I noted, had a bit of a tendency to stick to the pan, but that was almost certainly due to the glitch with the amount of butter, rather than the type of butter used. And even with only half the butter, the texture of it wasn't at all bad — not quite as flaky as Brian's usual butter crust, maybe, but tender and perfectly edible. And Brian reported that the Country Crock Plant Butter, which comes in stick form, was much easier to work with for a pie crust than the stuff we've been using up to now (Earth Balance or Smart Balance, sold in tubs). So we'll probably stick with this stuff in future for pastry purposes.

Once we managed to get it dished up, the pie was not lacking in flavor. The vegan gravy was as rich as all our Penzey's-based soups tend to be, and the vegetables contributed their own flavor as well. However, the seitan didn't really add much to it. In fact, the chunks of seitan in the pie had practically no taste of their own. Their chewiness added texture interest, and the protein in them no doubt made the dish more filling, but taste-wise, you couldn't even really tell they were there. So for our next veggie pot pie experiment, I'm thinking we should either go all the way and whip up a batch of the seitan tenders, which would presumably add more flavor to the mix — or go the other way and make this a type 2 recipe, with just veggies and no meat substitute at all.

We're now halfway through the vegan challenge, and this is probably the most complicated dish we'll make for it. Brian is planning our favorite Sesame Tofu (a type 1 dish) for tonight, and Pasta Romesco (also type 1) for tomorrow night. And for the final night, Thursday, we might actually be able to cruise past the finish line on leftovers.