Tuesday, June 09, 2020

seitan "brisket" vs. seitan "ribs"

Poor vegetarians. Whenever they make their cooking videos, they end up sounding a bit desperate, as if they were trying to convince themselves that what they're making actually tastes good. I think they need to dial down the self-congratulatory rhetoric and just concentrate on the cooking. This isn't to say that you don't hear any overweening smugness coming from the carnivore corner, but I do think the desperate vanity appears more frequently—and more intensely—among the plant-eaters.

That's not to disparage the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, of course. In truth, I'm sincerely interested in learning more about alternatives to meat—not because I buy into the "cruelty-free" argument, but because I'm often looking for new experiences and a change of pace.

In that spirit, I present to you two ways of prepping seitan, a "wheat meat" that I've been interested in for a long time. I took a stab at making my own loaf of seitan a long while back, and I failed miserably: the result tasted way too much like how dog food smells, and that was enough to curdle my stomach. Below are two videos about seitan. I've embedded one of the vids before; you might remember it. I'm displaying it here again, but this time alongside a video I just discovered. The old video is about seitan barbecue "ribs"; the new video is about seitan "brisket." In both cases, the cooks are annoyingly self-congratulatory, but the "meats" do look as though they'd be interesting to eat even if they aren't accurate simulations of actual meat. Here's The Avant-garde Vegan doing his seitan "ribs":


And here's The Wicked Kitchen (the channel is called Wicked Healthy) doing seitan barbecue "brisket":


So: now that you've watched both preps, which do you find more appetizing? Or are they both a horrifying affront to meat-eaters everywhere? The Wicked Kitchen guy ends his video by declaring his "brisket" sandwich "total Texas comfort," which I'm sure is going to cause red-blooded Texans to angrily slam their own nuts repeatedly in a door. That's another thing: I find it rather arrogant when these well-meaning plant-eaters attempt to pass their food off as a viable substitute for the carnivore's dish that they're aping. No one's going to be fooled by these efforts, so why not allow people to just enjoy the vegetarian food on its own terms? This leads to philosophically tinged questions about why the veggie crowd keeps trying to simulate meat, but I won't go there in this post. Watch the two videos, decide on which dish interests you more, and leave a comment explaining your thoughts.



2 comments:

Charles said...

I hope you'll excuse me if I don't watch those videos. Does this mean that I am going to be close-minded here and not countenance the idea that my pre-conceived notions might be wrong? You betcha!

I, too, have a hard time understanding why vegetarians often work so hard to ape meat. The only answer I can come up with is that it is a form of proselytization. They want to convince meat eaters that they wouldn't really be giving anything up by moving away from meat. Same thing with the Impossible Burger and the like.

I'm sure both of those dishes taste just fine, and they might even taste good! But they ain't meat, and they ain't ever gonna be meat. Why can't we be OK with that? Isn't it better to recognize the true nature of a thing rather than pretend it is something that it isn't?

Kevin Kim said...

Heh. I suspect your first paragraph could be applied to all the readers who blithely skip over the Styx, Tim Pool, and Larry Elder videos I'm constantly slapping up. "Don't wanna hear it!"

As for your analysis of the veggie mindset: yeah, I've heard vegans actually come out and say that that's their agenda, i.e., creating meat analogues is less about making something new for confirmed vegetarians and more about bringing more carnivores into the fold. Proselytizing for sure.

I've seen an increasing number of studies about vegetal sentience. Once there are enough such studies, the "ethical" argument for vegetarianism will collapse—at least the argument about not eating sentient beings. However, there might still be an ethical argument re: the amount of land needed to grow vegetables vs. raising livestock.