Recipe of the Month: Another vegan sausage attempt

Last month's vegan sausage rolls were a success in some ways. They were tasty and satisfying, and they demonstrated that it's possible to make a reasonable puff pastry with our new homemade plant butter. But as an actual sausage substitute—a vegan-friendly alternative for the grill—they didn't work at all. So this month, Brian decided to tackle another of the veggie-based sausage recipes I'd found during my online investigations. This one, from the Minimalist Baker site, seemed to have a reasonable amount of protein—about 5 grams per serving—without using tofu, tempeh, seitan, or any other "meat substitute" ingredients. That was enough of a novelty to make it worth a try.

This recipe features a combination of roasted beans, cooked quinoa, mushrooms, and chopped nuts as the base. We didn't have the pinto beans and pecans the recipe called for, so Brian subbed in the suggested alternatives, black beans and walnuts. The recipe said you could season the mixture with fresh thyme, sage, or rosemary, all of which we had in the garden; he went with sage as having the most traditional sausage flavor. Since I'm a bit of a spice wimp, he omitted the optional red pepper flakes and cut the black pepper down from a half-teaspoon to a generous pinch; he also omitted the fennel seeds, which I don't care for. However, he did include the optional pitted date, since the recipe said this serves "for binding" as well as "offsets the spice."

This turned out to be a wise decision. Even with the date included, the sausage mixture came out rather dry, and the patties formed from it didn't hold together well. If he'd made the eight largish patties the recipe called for, they might have fallen apart entirely, but instead he went for 14 smaller ones that were closer to the size he was used to for breakfast sausage. Eked out by roasted potatoes and broccoli, just two of these smaller patties made a reasonable meal for me.

Taste-wise, these were quite good. The carefully calibrated mix of seasonings—garlic, sage, smoked paprika, coconut aminos, salt, and pepper—produced an overall flavor that was remarkably sausage-like. The texture, however, was anything but. Despite being fried in a considerable amount of oil, the patties were still quite dry and crumbly. Grilling them would obviously be completely impractical, and even serving them as a stand-alone protein dish was a bit challenging. I thought maybe they'd work better topped with some sort of gravy, like the Swedish meatballs he made for me last fall. Brian's idea was that perhaps the mixture shouldn't be cooked on its own at all, but used as a filling for something like stuffed peppers or mushroom caps. It would probably work pretty well in a sausage roll, producing something much more worthy of the name than the so-called sausage rolls we made last month—but since we both liked the non-sausage filling, we'd prefer to make that recipe in its original form.

In short, this is yet another vegan sausage substitute that doesn't quite live up to its intended job. It tastes pretty good, and it might work well as an ingredient in some other recipe that calls for crumbled sausage, such as a pasta dish or an omelet. But if what you're looking for is an herbivore-friendly sausage to toss on the grill, this ain't it. I guess the search continues.