Unsure whether these should be called vegan au gratin potatoes or scalloped potatoes, I hit the googlenets to get down and dirty with some serious research to ascertain the difference between au gratin and scalloped. All the Yahoo! Answers responses and Wikipedia entries in the world would not prepare me for the number of serious queries about boxed and freeze dried potatoes out there.

Yes, millions of answers out there, laying latent in the hope that a functional half-wit will click through. It breaks my heart to realise what people consider to be food and that half an hour is considered an unreasonable amount of time for meal preparation. Okay, shutting up. I’ll judge the world more later.

Digging around surfaced the general concensus that the difference is vaguely semantic but commonly acknowledged as follows: potatoes au gratin are generally layered with cheese, topped with breadcrumbs, and oven-baked to obtain a crispy top layer. Scalloped potatoes, on the other hand, are cooked in a milk based white sauce.

So what happens if you combine the methods? Do I have vegan au gratin potatoes or vegan scalloped potatoes here?

Recipe Notes

Whether you call it a gratin or scalloped potatoes, this veganised version relies on a slightly atypical cooking method. Calling all folk who want a 30 minute scalloped potato dish: using the hob speeds the potato cooking up marginally and a final few minutes under the grill melts the cheese topping.

If your soy milk and yogurt mixture doesn’t cover all of the potatoes completely, don’t fret. The lid on the pan will help uncovered potatoes to steam, and if you use a good waxy new potato then they’ll cook fairly quickly anyway. If, after simmering for the instructed 15 minutes, your potatoes aren’t close to being done then try adding some more soy milk and yogurt and continue cooking for a little longer.

For the cheese topping, I used a mixture of Daiya cheddar style shreds, smoked Sheese, and grated toffuti mozzarella, but feel free to use whichever vegan cheese you prefer. Come to think of it, any creamy sauce would most likely work as well.

After a lengthy holiday in Southeast Asia, I’m back and ready to cook (well technically ready to sleep, but I’ll get around to both at some point). Sorry for the lack up updates being lazy and not updating while I was adventuring away.

The easiest country in which to be Vegetarian in Southeast Asia is easily, for me, Vietnam. A lot of people assume that since these countries are Buddhist, they are veggie-friendly. This is not the case, especially in Thailand where things like fish and oyster sauce are used in just about everything from sweet chilli dips to curries. In fact, the “vegetarian” sections of menu will often list things like “vegetables in oyster sauce.” Go figure.

I won’t dwell on that much, because having been there before I knew this was to be expected. But there is one thing I will dwell on, and that’s the quality of bean curd in the region. In Vietnam I ate it nearly every day, sometimes more. Very early on I made the decision that as soon as I got home I would order a SoyQuick soy milk maker and a tofu press. Now the trip has come and on, I’m back home, and have received my new toy. This morning was my first attempt at its use, and with the first batch of soy milk I decided to try to make some home made tofu.

Using the SoyQuick was dead easy and it really makes the soy milk in a speedy manner (the beans, of course, have to be soaked first), but I thought the clean-up was a bit tedious (but then again it was before sunrise — hey, I’m jetlagged). I followed the instructions (*gasp*) to coagulate the milk and poured it into some muslin in the tofu press, along with a tad of salt and some liquid smoke flavouring. The instructions instructed (fancy that) to press for only 15-20 minutes, but I left it for a couple of hours. I’ll admit this was mainly due to laziness over anything else.

The end result is pretty good for my first go, I think! I’ll be sure to experiment with lots of nifty flavours and such over the next weeks, so stay tuned!