Monday, December 10, 2012

Delicious Miracle Latkes: They're Vegan and Onion Free!



Even with a Jewish community the size of ours, there are always food allergies to take into consideration. My challenge was to come up with a recipe for eggless and onion-less latkes.

Inspired by my adventures with adding pea protein to seitan, I came up with this delicious alternative. It is, in fact, a whole meal. There's plenty of protein (with the gluten flour and the pea protein), a couple of vegetables, and there's even fruit when you serve it with applesauce. You can feel totally justified eating the whole batch, but these are really meant to share. This recipe is good for about 24 latkes.

Here's the recipe:

Set a pot of salted water on the stove. While it's coming to a boil, mix

1/2 cup gluten flour
1/2 cup pea protein
2 T nutritional yeast

in a bowl, and then add the mixture to 1 cup water.

Knead the mixture, and then break it up into four balls. Drop them in the water, cover the pot, and lower the flame (or burner) to a simmer.

It should take you about 15 minutes to prepare the vegetables. You can do this while the seitan is cooking.

Peel 2 large baking potatoes and grate them. Grate the zucchini with the skin on. Drain as much water as you can from the grated vegetables (you'll need to use your hands to squeeze them). Chop the parsley, and add it to the grated vegetables.

Your seitan balls should look like this when you remove them from that water. I know they're creepy looking, but they won't look like this for long.



Drain the seitan as much as possible. Mash it up and it to the vegetable mixture, and mix everything together with your hands. Add 1/2 cup salt and several grinds of black pepper. My black pepper mixture has some coriander in it, so a dash of coriander might be welcome as well.

Heat some olive oil in a pan, and fry the latkes until they are golden brown and tender. The amount of water in your potatoes will determine how long they need to cook, but 10 or 15 minutes, with occasional turning, seems to be a good amount of time. After they are cooked you can put them onto a baking sheet in a 375-degree oven to reheat for later.

N.B. Don't try to bake these instead of frying them. It just doesn't work. Save the baking sheet for reheating.

No comments: