Chili does seem like a good vehicle for plant based protein. There’s alot of non meat options that I like, but almost none are “meat replacements.”
Just let it be it’s own thing FFS. What’s terrible as a ““burger”” might be delicious in chili.
100% agree. There is tons of delicious vegetarian/vegan food, but vegetarian/vegan substitutions of traditionally meat based dishes range from terrible to just okay.
Carb replacement dishes have the same problem. Spaghetti Squash is delicious when cooked as a vegetable, but throwing Ragu on it and pretending it is pasta is just sad.
This is a good take. You can’t replace a steak with plant based, but we eat a lot of meat in things where it doesn’t matter as filler. Most ground beef recipes can be replaced easily with plant based alternatives with no difference. I know I feel less bloated after eating something with soy crumbles over ground beef.
I just want to take the pepsi challenge on this, if you think your meat-free chilli tastes better PM me that recipe. I’ll give it a honest (omnivore) review.
Just replace your ground beef with imitation meat ground, the texture works so much better, while not effecting the flavor, you just dont need to drain it like the normal meat.
I’d rather just use more beans than imitation meat because beans are already plenty tasty. That said, I’m not likely to make a meatless chili unless I’m having to feed someone who doesn’t eat meat.
This. Don’t build vegan meals with meat replacements. Build vegan meals that never had or wanted meat. Cheaper, better for you, and made with ingredients you can get at the shitty neighborhood grocer. My partner and I started doing meat free Fridays for Lent as we’re both recovering Catholics, and we decided it was a fun challenge to keep it up and try to do it with all raw ingredients. I’ve learned a ton about south Asian and east Asian cooking, eaten a lot of truly excellent veg* food, saved buckets of money and now I have a healthy respect for beans and lentils.
I made the best pulled pork Sandwich last weekend using Chicken-of-the-woods mushroom in place of the pork.
I shredded the mushroom, dry sauteed until the tips began to brown. I added just a splash of oil, cumin, paprika, and oregano. Once the aromatics started smelling great I put in a light amount barbecue sauce for the last couple of moments. Then onto a toasted bun with some fried onions. Delicious!
The government doesn’t want you to know this but the food in the woods is free, you can just take it home.
INB4
Look at my teeth! I am a carnivorous HUNTER! I stalk the dangerous plains of… Albertsons… with a sharp knife I
forged?bought! at Wal-Mart so I canrundrive home and enjoy memes. Eating meat is my natural state!
Humans are omnivores by default and we’re not even that good apparently at digesting grains or beans. Tell me more about how veganism is your natural state.
veganism is your natural state.
Oh it’s not. But I feel like you are missing my point by assuming I think it is? As a concept, “natural” overrated, meaningless and not worth striving for. Both of us wear shoes, most people wear glasses and the majority of us travel by car. None of that is “natural”, but if you are gonna cite that as a reason to eat meat then why not also go walk through the woods barefoot and nearsighted as well? Nothing about our modern medicine system is natural (but it makes us live longer), traveling to the moon isn’t natural, heck the two of us talking over the internet isn’t natural (but a net connection brings us both radically more knowledge than we would’ve had generations ago). Very little of our lives are so, why should this be a metric to care about?
Say whatever you like about digesting grains, not only do you definitely still eat beans and bread. But if you want to look at the science, there is strong evidence that veganism correlated to longer life, less disease and increased overall health while meat is a known carcinogen. And this totally ignored the environmental and ethical reasons for veganism, those exist.
But at the end of the day everyone should be way more concerned about scientific data, reason and logic than something as nebulous as living “naturally”.
