Wednesday 21 February 2024

Vegan Breakfast Sandwiches

 

I've been wanting to make vegan breakfast sandwiches for some time. But trying to find the right recipes for the sausages and eggs was a challenge. I didn't want just store-bought processed vegan food products. Those are okay in a pinch, but I prefer to make my food from scratch and then I'm in control of the ingredients, and can make sure that they're mostly (if not all) whole foods and healthy. 
I tried the vegan Unsausage recipe first, and was happily impressed. Nice texture, great flavour. I found it in my cookbook, Give Them Something Better. But I have since found that the cookbook authors have posted it online here. This time, I cut they cayenne to 1/4 teaspoon as the first time I made them, I found them a little hot for my taste. I also allowed the mixture to sit for at least 10 minutes, not the 5 that's in the recipe. Using a wide mouth canning jar lid to form the patties, I found it made about 13. With a narrow mouth lid, it makes about 25. 
The next thing to tackle was the "egg". I had tried a chickpea omelette once before and really wasn't impressed with the taste or texture. Recently, I decided to make foods that reminded me of my mother on what would have been her 99th birthday, Valentine's Day (she passed away in 1998). One of those things was a western sandwich, which is basically an omelette between 2 pieces of toast. I googled "vegan western sandwich" and found one that sounded tasty, but it was basically a scrambled tofu recipe. And the filling in a western sandwich is not scrambled. So, instead, I googled "vegan omelette" and found The Best Vegan Omelette Recipe. Honestly, I can't say that I've tried every single vegan omelette recipe out there, so I can't say that this is "the best", but it certainly worked out best for me. It's simple, fast and tasty. To use it in a sandwich, I mixed sauteed onions and red peppers into the batter and cooked it on both sides, rather than fold it. In order to fit it into the breakfast sandwiches, I cut it into 4 pieces, so there was enough for 4 sandwiches (and no, I didn't eat four sandwiches. I ate 2, and regretted it about halfway through the second sandwich). 
Originally, I had planned on putting these sandwiches into store-bought English muffins. Eventually, I am going to try making my own, but in the meantime, I can at least find whole wheat ones in the supermarket. However, I have been playing with sourdough lately (more on that in another post) and have been trying to find ways to use up the discard (you have to discard some of the starter daily or twice daily before you "feed" it with more flour and water). I don't like to waste food, so I've been following recipes that use sourdough discard, so I don't have to "discard" it. This is the recipe for the biscuits I used for the sandwiches: Buttery Sourdough Biscuits. Buttery is the operative word, and I likely won't be using this recipe again because there is too much fat! I used Earth Balance Buttery Spread for the butter and whole wheat pastry flour for the flour. They taste good, but I don't want to be consuming things that high in processed fat on a regular basis. 
So, two thumbs up for both the sausage recipe and the omelette recipe. One thumb up for taste on the buscuit recipe, but one thumb down for fat content.