Top Chef Texas Recap–How to adapt great reciepes to vegan-friendly meals

How to adapt great reciepes to vegan-friendly meals

A review of the latest episode of Top Chef Texas where Chefs adapt their cooking skills in difficult and new environments and how you can adapt their meat dishes into vegetarian friendly meals.

Tonight on Top Chef: Texas four of the remaining chefs (Lyndsey, Beverly, Sarah, and Paul) competed in some crazy ‘Olympic Games’ themed challenges that showed how well they could adapt to unconventional cooking environments. The chefs were left with motion sickness after the first challenge which called for them to create a meal during their ride up a mountain in a gondola. And despite her insecure crying, Lyndsey came out on top in the this challenge with salmon over red quinoa “risotto” with chorizo and horseradish vinaigrette dish.

The second challenge forced the chefs to work for their ingredients, which were frozen inside huge blocks of ice. Paul’s strength came in handy as he broke his ingredients out the ice light-years before the ladies, and it paid off when he won the challege with his corn soup with onion, red chili and peaches.

Competition eventually boiled down to Beverly and Sarah in the last challenge that included a pointless gauntlent of cross country skiing and shooting ranges before they could get to the kitchen. I was really betting on Beverly to come out on top with my favorite dish of the night, a seafood “stew” with couscous. But apparently the judges don’t get as excited about couscous as I do, because they ruled in favor of Sarah’s braised rabbit leg and heart with cherries, hazelnuts & sauerkraut purée…really? REALLY?

Sadly, none of the dishes prepared in this episode was sans meat or seafood, but I am going to take this opprotunity to dive into the issue I run into alot: reworking meat-heavy recipies to fit a vegetarian/vegan diet. Subscribing to a vegetarian/vegan diet  shouldn’t stop you from taking inspiration from Top Chef’s creative meals into your own kitchen. Let me know show you how….

My first piece of advice is to try to find a similar veggie-based substitute to replace the meat originally featured in the recipe. Just keep in mind that it is very important to do some research beforehand into how to prepare meatless subsitutes like tofu and tempeh because it will usually differ greatly from the meat prep for the original recipe. At the bottom of this post I made a small list of options when replacing meat with the help of vegproductsguide.com

Another option to consider: The chefs in this episode have a lot of flavorful side dishes to their meat that you could just simply cut the meat out. Now, if you watch this show it might seem like I am advocating anorexic-sized meals since they serve such small portions, but just take those sides and double it, maybe adding in some pasta or rice. Voila!

Meat Substitution List

Substitute Bacon with soy-based bacon strips 

Substitute ground beef/burgers with either soy-based Boca products or black bean burgers, which dont really taste like beef, but are alot tastier than their bland soy counterparts in my opinion.

Substitute Chicken with soy-based chik’n strips, nuggets, patties, etc.

Substitute Turkey with tofu or sliced soy deli cuts

Substitute Seafood with tofu or “Vegecyber Frozen Gourmet” products, these are harder to find locally but offers the flavor that tofu lacks.

Substitute pork with “Cedar Lake Chops”

Subsitute ribs with “Garden Burger BBQ Riblets ”

Substitute Eggs with tofu ‘scrambler’ products