The beauty of being an omnivore is that you get to eat anything and everything in sight. You can have a meal filled with meat or you can have a vegetarian meal. Often, with no forethought, I end up eating a vegetarian meal. And sometimes, I have a meal where animal flesh is more decorative than substantial.
But I don't usually eat "fake meats."
I know many of my vegetarian friends use tofu, tempeh, seitan, and other alternatives to the beef, chicken, and pork that the rest of us eat. I have never been able to do well with fake meats. You could blame that on bad preparation, not the right seasoning, or any of a multitude of reasons. If you have to douse the fake meat in tons of barbecue sauce, you should be eating something else.
While the abundance of soy can be a long-term problem, I wouldn't pick against a fake meat if it would work for me.
Before I gave up on adding fake meats into my diet, there was one fake meat I had never tried but thought I should give a chance: seitan. Besides the cool name, I wanted to try an easy-to-find non-soy product, though the seitan I found was seasoned with soy sauce.
The hardest part was giving this fake meat a proper introduction into my diet. I decided on a chili since I had been looking for a protein alternative to beef. And since the fake meats are supposed to blend in like meat, chili was appropriate.
I decided to give the seitan a bit of help by adding crimini mushrooms to the sauté as well as to the chili, figuring the seitan could absorb the mushroom flavor. I know tofu is better for absorbing, but thought seitan needed all the help it could get.
If the test for fake meat was sight, seitan would have made it to Round 2. The crumbles looked like ground beef, even if cooked beef wasn't quite that color. However, color wasn't relevant when all the ingredients are dumped in a bowl of chili.
The smell wasn't particuarly noticeable either way, a good sign. I couldn't bring myself to taste it either raw or cooked by itself, as the true test laid in the chili.
The ground seitan had a nice consistency when I stirred the chili; maybe we had a winner.
Sight, smell, consistency meant nothing if the tongue and teeth didn't like the product. The first bite. Chewing. Chewing. More chewing. Finally, swallowing without knowing if I chewed enough. The next bite I just swallowed. Swallowing it was okay, but chewing the seitan took a lot of effort that I didn't feel like doing after awhile.
After a bit of swallowing, and this was with the very pleasant mushrooms and my own homemade chili recipe, I finally picked up the seitan pieces and set them aside.
My palette is very sensitive, or if yours isn't or you aren't a fan of chewing or you feel the need to go vegetarian, figuring you'll get used to it, seitan may be for you.
Ending the test there would have been satisfying, but would not have been complete. To test the impact of the fake meat, the next day's chili just had mushrooms. My palette also does not like chunks of things in soups, stews, etc. — the whole consistency thing. The mushrooms went well, though I enjoy them more in spaghetti.
Mushrooms don't have nearly as much protein as seitan but they have lots of vitamins, fiber, and few calories outside the oil used to sauté them. And the consistency and flavor rocked my palette and taste buds.
Non-meat sources of protein are plentiful, so choosing one to go in chili or whatever else you are making can be fun without being challenging. And if I liked beans, well, there wouldn't have been a column in this space.
I could be more vegetarian someday or a lot more flexitarian. But if I am going to go without meat in a meal, more vegetables is the better way for me to go.
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