Melktert is a South African dessert made from milk, which I suppose explains the English translation (milk tart). The pastry used seems to vary depending on preference, so a sweet shortcrust should work also. Whatever. This served me well for my third dinner last night and first breakfast of today.

I still have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never had this dessert before, even in my pre-vegan days, but the idea of a not too sweet custard like pudding appealed to my experimental side regardless (speaking of experiments, what do you think of this gem of a fusion foods project).

First you will want to make a rich batch of fresh soy milk. Soak 1/2 cup of dried soy beans in two cups of water overnight. In the morning blend the water and beans to a pulp in a liquidiser/blender and pour into a medium saucepan to heat. Swish an extra 1/2 cup of water around the blender to pick up any bits that didn’t make it into the pan and pour it in.

Heat on medium high until the mixture starts to rise. Immediately turn the heat to medium low and heat for around ten more minutes, or until the gross beany smell is gone and it begins to smell sweet.

Line a mesh strainer with a piece of fine muslin and place it over a large bowl. Pour the contents of the pan into the strainer and mix it around a bit to allow some of the soy milk to seep through. Add 1/2 cup of boiling water into the pulp and stir it through. Rather than burn my hand off, I tend to leave it for 10-15 minutes before wringing the muslin to extract the soy milk, but the general idea is just get the liquid out. As much as you can. You should be left with about 2 cups of soy milk in the end, give or take.

Be sure to save the now strained soy pulp inside (okara!) because you can use it for lots of other things.

Pour the soy milk into a shallow frying pan and put the heat on low. Super low. As in no bubbles, no potential for boiling. After 5-10 minutes you will see a skin form (try lightly blowing on the surface of the milk and you will definitely start to see it after a few minutes). Once a solid skin has formed across the surface of the milk, carefully cut around the edges or stab them down with a chopstick so you can remove the sheet from the pan.

I would like to give advice on how to do this cleanly, but basically I just fling soy milk across the kitchen and eat the yuba straight out of the pan with chopsticks (with a tiny bit of soy sauce or kecap manis is my favourite).

Each time you pull a sheet off the top a new one will begin to form, so the yield is dependent on the size of the pan you’re using and how much soy milk is in there.

Even if you’ve only got the patience for one sheet, give it a try. You can always store the rest of the soy milk for a rainy day. Or coffee.

Recipe Notes

I experimented with this recipe in all sorts of ways, using all combinations of soy cream, milk, and yogurt. This vegan panna cotta recipe produced the most consistent result out of all the trials, but none of them were absolute failures. I guess my point is that you’ll have a hard time making an absolute mess of this. The basic gist is somewhere around 1 teaspoon of agar per cup of liquid. You could get away with a little less for an extra floppy flan.

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!