Welcome to the Vegan Theory Club Weekly Megathread!
Question of the week:
What’s a kitchen tool or appliance you can’t live without as a vegan cook?
Feel free to talk about anything, whether it’s vegan-related or not. This is a chill space for connecting, sharing ideas, and supporting each other.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone’s up to!
In other VTC News: @trent@vegantheoryclub.org started c/suicidefood to bring back an old blog that had pictures of animals in carnist restaurants as if they wanted to be eaten, it was a famous vegan blog in the 2006-2011 for its shock value. Subscribe from your instance by searching !suicidefood@vegantheoryclub to cache it locally so we can all be collectively horrified. Or block it if you don’t like it lol
My music lol
I don’t think it 100% fits the question but listening to metal or rap really gets me motivated to cook
That’s an extremely important ingredient!
slow cooker. i don’t like cooking but i have to feed this meat sack every day so anything that allows for that to be easier. pressure cooker, sure, but i’m a fan of “dump it in the slow cooker on my lunch break and then eat it for dinner” levels of effort.
speaking of effort, i’m an idiot and am in a go-at-your-own-pace degree program, but the semester ends in 16 days and i have… four classes to complete. gonna be a long two weeks.
Best of luck with the classes. Online classes can be deceptively hard to keep up with if you take on too many at once.
Another vote for pressure cooker. It can pressure cook (obviously), slow cook, sauté, and cook rice. I’m sure theres more! But basically combines a lot of kitchen appliances into one. We do use a huge slow cooker for when we double recipes but if i had to just pick one appliance and get rid of the rest then id be picking the pressure cooker for versatility.
My electric pressure cooker. It allows me, the human goblin tornado, to approximate wfpb food with little effort and expense.
You know, 16 years ago I would have also highly ranked my pressure cooker (mine was not electric). Being able to go from dry beans to meal in less than an hour was fantastic. But when my daughter was born I just surrendered to canned beans out of necessity, so I haven’t used it in years. Actually that’s not true, I just don’t use the lid, the pot is great for making soups, etc.
Nothing wrong with canned beans!
They aren’t the right solution for me, but it’s a matter of a total lack of object permanence and planning ability, lol.
Because I figured electric pressure cooker would be number one, I’m going to go with something different and say my box grater and mandoline. I find chopping with a knife annoying and grate a lot of veggies, I find it relaxing.
So i definitely prefer using a knife but my wife did get me a mandolin and the thing I’ll say is i do love the speed and consistency. If i want something looking real nice i use the mandolin so everything is evenly cut and people think i have master level knife skills until i tell them i ‘cheated’. I do think it’s interesting how many people will notice and comment on the uniformity of things being diced
I’m surprised to learn this about you! I always figured you were a food processor kind of guy.
I use both lol, depends on time. If I’m in the middle of work its the processor, if its relaxing time its the grater
Maybe this is too basic, but my vote is for the humble chef’s knife. I can live without most kitchen gadgets (even if they make my life way easier), but the tool I use literally every meal is a chef’s knife.
Love my chef knife. Was talking with a friend who got into forging and told me if i ever visited he could show me how to make my own 👀 for some reason using a chefs knife i actually made really speaks to me. If only he didn’t live so far away lol
I have a knife that is my go to, so I feel you on this one.
I can’t live without the gadgets and it made me hate alton brown for wasting so much of my time doing everything the hard way!
Ahhh, another no-single-use-gadgets victim. My sympathies. Alton taught me to cook too. xD
Tool: pressure cooker, electric, plus slowcook and rice functions.
It means even in the worst depressions a bowl of rice and lentils is only 20 minutes away with one pot to clean. Sure it’s mush, but it’s better than not having it. Outside of depressions then it’s just a handy tool for cooking in a hurry, or simmering away a sauce with no supervision etc.
In life:
Please somebody end my suffering, I got roped into building a website and it’s supposed to go live on the 21st. In user testing it turned out that every single one of the board members of this club had a different version of the rules for the booking system to both each other and what was written down. They just had an emergency meeting to clarify last night and I have had to send back nine (9) points to clarify further. With stimulants and anger many things are possible but 4 days to build and test a mostly entirely rebuilt booking engine sure fucking approaches the limit.
EDIT: I am a god :p
The reminds me the other month i volunteered for a group that wanted a custom app built. We went through the requirements, i build it, i demo it, and they ask why it’s doing XYZ. I tell them the was what they wanted. Turns out they actually wanted some completely different logic that was a near total re-write. If i had just been contracting i would’ve had this kind of stuff built into the pricing/ conditions but for volunteer work it kind of sucked to waste hours on functionality i had to competely redo. And looking back it wasn’t like i didn’t ask the right questions.
Just can’t solve orgs having poor communication
The thing is in November I had a meeting, went over the spec again and demoed everything. Explained what was to implement still and showed a mock up.
Then they changed rules and never told me!
I’m getting paid a nominal amount (15 k aud) but with these last changes I literally just got off the phone from my god I’m earning it.
I quit programming because it makes me a nasty and stressed out person. This just reaffirms why.
Thoughts and prayers D:
I don’t have a lot of gadgets and as the good old knife was already mentioned, I’ll throw in an induction cooking field. After a life of cooking with heating elements, induction was a game changer. Controling the heat level almost instantaneously stripped a lot of hustle from cooking.
I’m a fairly recent induction inductee and I 100% agree I fucking love my single burner and I want to get a second soon
I also love my induction burner. When I was in a studio apartment using the gas would make the place stink so I put on a cover and used a plug in induction burner for a year and there was no going back.
Beyond my chef knife, my tofu press. It’s such a simple thing, but it makes my tofu cook better and is way easier than wrapping in and finding two plates and something heavy like I used to do.
Which one do you have? I have the Tofuture and I love it
Nothing so fancy. Just a bamboo press on springs with tightening nuts. Not even sure on the brand. Bought it to make sure I’d like it/get use out of it, and it’s been going strong for 6 years or so.
Obviously our Joyoung self-cleaning soy milk machine.
Is there anything else to add? Everyone should have one.
Really worth it that much?
Do you miss the fortified nature of store bought but garbage tasting milk?
It’s probably made back what it cost us several times over.
We do fine without fortification as we are proud weak vegans.
We get milk at 2-3 bucks a litre. Beans are ~4 bucks a kg. Which I think makes about 6 litres. So 4 becomes about 20 bucks.
The machine is 500 bucks. Hmm about 33 litres to break even. Probably around one year of milk.
Ignoring any improvements in taste and the lack of annoying running out of milk and bulky shopping trips.
Hmm. Not terrible for a luxury item. What do you do with the okara?
Also does that self cleaning thing make veggie juice? it says fruit, unsure if veggies are too pulpy.
For milk it’s more 60g per litre so you’d have 15-20 litres per kg of beans - more than that and it’s very thick.
We leave the okara inside often when cooking but otherwise we filter it out with a cheese cloth on the side - but it’s drinkable unfiltered just a bit grainy. And we just compost it when we do throw it away.
Tbh we only use it to make nut milks and soy milk, but I’ve made soup once or twice with it. I don’t think it’s its best use however.
I… bought one XD
That’s amazing lol if you’re anything like us you will cherish it every day.
It’s amazing waking up to hot, fresh soymilk.
I have a soy milk maker (Soyajoy, circa 2001), though I haven’t used it in many years. But when I did, I would save the okara and make it into little “meatballs”. I cannot remember the recipe (though I think arrowroot was a key ingredient) but I am pretty sure it came from Bill Shurtleff’s “Book of Tofu”.
To be completely honest this is the first time I’m hearing of such a device 🙈
Ours is a Joyoung, definitely a luxury model but with how often it is used it’d have been scarcely needed to spare pocket change over the initial purchase and would have lead to it being used less often.
It’s great lol it has like a small tube that rotates and throws all the water it uses for cleaning into a separate container.
Nice! Right now cabinet space is at a premium but someday i hope to have the time and energy to learn how to build some extra cabinets (or money to pay someone to do it lol). Then i can consider such a magical device!
I only have a non self cleaning one 😔
Love my rice cooker. It’s so much easier than making rice in a pot and has about 0 risk of burning anything.
I also love our rice cooker but one time i pressed brown rice instead of white rice button and our sushi rice ended up not cooking right. I had made sushi for the extended family and everyone was nice and said it tasted fine but i think they were just being nice cuz that sushi rice was hard when you bit into it lol
Oh no! Mine doesn’t have different modes but sometimes that happens if I don’t use enough water. Often fixable by adding more water and turning the rice cooker back on.
Yeah this was the first time it happened to me and i had already made the rolls when i noticed so too late to fix lol
Darn, too bad! Here’s hoping for perfectly cooked rice in all our future endeavors
Hell yeah, this is a good choice too. I didn’t have one for a while because I thought my instant pot could do it all but its so much better to have one. I often use them both at the same time!
