Related to the earlier mac and cheeze post, but this time made with shells, and the white miso. I put a little too much margarine into the roux, but it came out just fine. Better than fine, it came out delicious.

The one thing that this sauce has in common with my grandmother’s homemade mac and cheese (my personal holy grail), is that it reheats for shit. The sauce gets all clumpy.

Mac and “cheese.” Pretty much the vegan holy grail. Many bloodied attempts have been made across the world to make this dish actually resemble childhood memories rather than the smell of feet… but to no avail. Some crusty hippies have managed to convince themselves that their Made Entirely Out of Nooch sauces taste more like Grandma’s recipe than Grandma herself, but LSD will do that.

Let’s get things straight: I have a problem with nooch. I can choke down a (whole) box of Shells and Chreeze with the best of them (mostly out of sheer laziness), but I would never in a thousand years feed it to an omni… or even another vegan. And even then, I smother than shit in ketchup. Nooch works when it’s not the main, overwhelming flavor. Nutritional yeast is like the bratty kid in the playground, the little shit that terrorizes all of the good kids and makes you want to kick him in the throat. (Hands up, who wants me to babysit their kids?) Nooch must be taught how to play nicely with other ingredients and sit in the background.

Lolo at VeganYumYum has developed a mac and cheeze that honestly doesn’t make me wish I were eating something else. That’s an actual compliment, since making vegan cheese products is frustratingly (read: seemingly fucking impossibly) hard to accomplish. You won’t be fooled into thinking that someone slipped you a Velveeta roofie, but it’s damn satisfying. And it doesn’t taste or smell like feet.

I used red miso because that’s all I had in the apartment, and it still came out pretty good. It would have a nicer, more mellow flavor with the white. Also, in my house, mac and cheese isn’t baked. Breadcrumbs? Blasphemy. But like a good little instruction-follower, I always make recipes as written for the first time. Tonight, I’ll be making it with the white miso and skip this baking chicanery.

Nom nom nom…

I saw this recipe on VeganYumYum and knew that I had to make it. I also have an announcement to make to the vegan (and eggless) world:

This is what Ener-G Egg Replacer was made for.

Seriously. It’s ass in everything else, ever, but it makes for such a kick ass egg wash for breading stuff to be fried. Everything comes out really crispy and wonderful. Ener-G, I’ll never doubt you again, baby. Take me back? I can change!

I ended up making a ton because my “tub” of tofu is a full pound, so I doubled up on the sauce (which was a little too much because I had forgotten to add broccoli or other veggies to the mix) and added to the wash and cornstarch breading as needed. I don’t quite know how I feel about the taste of the sauce, as it doesn’t quite taste like sweet and sour to me but that may be a regional difference. The sauce tasted more to me like an unfinished orange sauce – if you add orange zest and some sesame oil to it, I think it would be spot on.