A kitchen failure

Everyone who’s ever cooked or baked has had something that didn’t turn out. Sometimes the results are unpalatable or even inedible, but whatever they end up being, we try to learn and not repeat the experience. So it is, too, when we try a new product that we haven’t used before, and I recently had a kitchen failure with such a product, “Sunfed Chicken Free Chicken” (photo upper left), a vegan substitute for chicken made here in New Zealand.

First, though, a bit of background. I’ve been cutting back on red meat as part of doctors’ advice to eat the heart-healthy Mediterranean Diet. It’s low in red meat, relatively low in poultry and dairy products, and with some fish, and a lot of plant-based foods. Obviously the easiest way to do that would be to adopt a vegetarian diet, but I like the meat-based dishes I’ve had my whole life, and there are still some questions about how safe a vegetarian diet is for someone with gout. Despite that, I’ve been looking for healthier versions of meals, like using Funky Felds Minced instead of beef mince (“ground beef” in the USA), something I wrote about back in December. We’re still using Minced and still enjoy it.

In that December post I also mentioned the chicken substitute, but it took me a little while to find because I didn’t realise it was frozen. Oops. When I did buy it, I brought it home and put it in the freezer, where it stayed. The truth is, I was leery of it. That’s not about the chicken substitute: I felt the same way before I used Minced for the first time, unsure of whether it would work in the recipe, what it would taste like, those sorts of things. In the case of Minced, it all worked out really well, but in the case of the chicken substitute, well, not so much.

I decided I’d use it to make a curry I usually make with chicken, using a commercial korma paste as the spice, along with coconut milk. A couple weeks ago, finally did that.

Inside the box.

I began by trying to cut the chicken substitute into smaller, more bite-sized pieces, as I would with chicken, but it was very difficult to cut while frozen. I found I could break it into chunks with my hands, and this is what I did. I didn’t thaw it first because the package instructions said it could be cooked from frozen.

The instructions also said to brown it first, much like the Minced package said, so I did that while I prepared the sauce part (the chicken goes in last for the real version, too). I put the chicken in, cooked it for a couple minutes before adding some water and the coconut milk, all according the recipe. With chicken, I would leave it to simmer until the chicken was fully cooked, then serve over some Basmati rice. This is where it all went wrong.

The dish absorbed all the liquid, making it dry and paste-like. It also didn’t smell of the korma paste. So, I added some coconut cream (rather than coconut milk) to try and increase the liquid without making it runny (coconut cream is thicker than coconut milk). The chicken substitute then broke up and became something like shredded chicken.

In the end, it had almost no flavour whatsoever—not korma taste, no coconut taste, not much of anything except a taste of yellow peas, which is what the chicken substitute is made from. On the other hand, the texture really was like chicken, as everyone I’d heard had said—shredded chicken, sure, but chicken nonetheless.

The experiment was a total fail. There are things I could—and, I now think, should—have done differently: I could have put the browned chicken substitute in and just warmed it through in the sauce just before serving (probably having thawed it before browning it). That never occurred to me because with real chicken part of the goal is to infuse it with all the lovely flavours, and also because simmering the Minced product in the tomato pasta sauce enhanced the flavour of the dish. I assumed, wrongly, as it turned out, that using the chicken substitute would be similar to using Minced.

Another option would be to use the chicken substitute in a dish in which shredded chicken is called for, and there are several of them. I have another packet in the freezer, so I’ll have to think about it some more. But I certainly won’t do the same thing the same way again.

I’ve had a lot of successes with meat-free dishes using alternatives to meat, and this is my first actual failure—a pretty good average, really. I’m not done experimenting yet, but I have to admit to being a little reluctant at the moment, even though it’s probably fair to chalk this failure up mostly to user error: There could have been a note on the package informing consumers that prolonged simmering in a sauce would cause the chicken substitute to break up.

The goal of all these recipe experiments has been to reduce the amount of meat we consume, not to replace it entirely. On Tuesday night last week I made the recipe again using real chicken, and it was lovely, as it always had been. It helped to erase the memory of the recipe fail from my mind and tastebuds.

I’ll be doing more recipe experiments in the months ahead, and I’ll talk about them too. When I eventually use that other package of the chicken substitute, I’ll add an update to this post with the link to the new one. For now, though, this is the only time I’ve used it.

Right now, though, it’s time to get back to my food lab.

The products listed and their names are all registered trademarks, and are used here for purposes of description and clarity. No person, company, or entity provided any support or payment for this blog post, and all products were purchased by me at normal retail prices. So, the opinions I expressed are my own genuinely held opinions, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the manufacturers, any retailer, or any known human being, alive or dead, real or corporate. Just so we’re clear.