I never used to like tofu. I found it bland and quite watery and wasn’t overly keen on the texture either. I used to hate mushrooms. As a kid – and in my teens, and really, my twenties and early thirties – I thought they tasted like slugs (I don’t think I ever actually ate a slug, so obviously it was more that they felt like what a slug looked like it would taste like, but still). I couldn’t stand aubergines as a kid and found them slimy – hmm, and actually with quite a slug-like texture again; maybe I did eat a slug at some point and this is all childhood trauma that I need to work out in therapy.
Aubergines are now probably one of my top favourite foods. I love them in a pasta sauce, or in my pancake lasagne. I love them fried simply in a bit of olive oil. In moussaka. With some teryaki sauce alongside rice or noodles. The only way I really don’t like them is baba ganoush (sliminess again, I think).
Mushrooms, I have grown to enjoy and appreciate in a variety of ways and I don’t associate them with slugs any more. They’re not a top favourite yet, though an important ingredient for giving some deep savouriness, such as in bolognese or shepherd’s pie. But I enjoy them more and more when someone else has included them in a meal and am trying more dishes where they are a significant ingredient.
My love of tofu has grown very gradually and I am certain there’s still more ways I can enjoy it and experiment with it. But I can enjoy tofu as it comes, weighted down and fried, coated in a variety of powders and fried to give a crispy sticky outer with a lovely soft inside… Silken tofu to tone down a spicy mapo tofu… Scrambled tofu… I haven’t experimented much with tofu as a base for a sweet dish, as yet. But I will happily include tofu in lots of meals now, and not just meals of Asian origin.
So surely I should enjoy tempeh too? Tempeh is tofu with bells on – fermented bells. And it’s really good to include fermented food in your diet – for your gut biome (at least that’s what many articles and books I have read recently are saying; I’m not a scientist or nutritionist or anything more than some who enjoys cooking and eating, so if I say something like that it’s based on reading around or my own experience, not gospel that you should feel obliged to follow).
Tempeh is tofu with bells on – fermented bells.
Tempeh is, like tofu, one of those foods that is lightly processed, but maintains loads of goodness. I am not personally a fan of meat substitutes, probably because I’ve never, willingly, eaten meat and therefore don’t miss it and so have no need to find a direct replacement. But I also don’t really enjoy many of them. For me a veggie burger is a burger made up of a bunch of vegetables, with some grains to pull it together; not a slab vegetable matter that has been super processed to try to feel, taste and look like ‘the real thing’. We have a few Quorn products in the house as the kids like them, but I’m not keen on most of them and would far rather have a dish of varied vegetables than a chunk of Quorn.
(Incidentally, I have absolutely no issue with people who enjoy Quorn and Beyond Burgers and the plethora of other plant-based meat substitutes out there – I love that they exist and that there are more and more options opening up for people wanting to become vegetarian and vegan, or even just to reduce the meat they eat. I am absolutely not about policing what anyone else chooses to eat, including my own family.)
So, in my mission to eat a much higher proportion of plant-based foods, reduce the ultra-processed stuff, and generally build a much better gut biome for my next few decades, I thought I really needed to give tempeh more of a try.
To be fair, I have not had a huge exposure to tempeh. The first time I ate it, I was a young teenager and it was cooked by a visiting relative, who had fermented his own tempeh. I am sure it was an absolutely brilliant example of tempeh. But I was a teenager. A teenager who liked coca-cola and crisps and pizza. So I didn’t jump up and down with glee at this new food I was being introduced to.
Other times I’ve had it have tended to be in stir fries and I’m not sure anything exciting has been done with the tempeh (in the same way as my early experiences of tofu were not big on using different flavours or ways of cooking). I think we’ve just cut it up and fried it, maybe throwing in some teryaki sauce or similar. I have found it both bland, but also really didn’t like the texture (too chewy – quite possibly too ‘meaty’ for me, actually) and there’s been that odd taste follow-up that I think is down to the fermentation – something I tend to enjoy more and more these days (such as in kombucha or kimchi, or even sourdough bread, actually), but still don’t quite ‘get’.
In this week’s shop, I decided to buy a tempeh mince I saw. I thought it might be a way to include mince in recipes that have traditionally had meat mince in them, such as bolognese, chilli or shepherd’s pie. It was a very simple version that didn’t look overly processed at all, so I thought would be a good one to try. (If you’re interested it was Tiba Tempeh Plant-based Mince.) And I decided to put it in a bolognese to go with spaghetti.
It worked fine, I guess. I also had carrots, onion, garlic, some rehydrated dried mushrooms (because it turned out we had no actual fresh mushrooms in the fridge), tinned tomatoes, tomato puree and a bunch of herbs. But I didn’t really like it.
I didn’t hate it or anything. But it felt bland and I still didn’t like the texture. I would much, much, much rather have had my default bolognese protein – lentils. Other people in the house don’t like lentils, though, so I only get to make that occasionally. I wanted an alternative that would work for more people. But I’m not sure it’s going to work if I don’t like it at all!
I would appreciate any advice you might have on different ways to cook tempeh. I’d be interested to experiment a bit more and feel like there should be potential for me to get to the point, like I have with mushrooms and tofu, where I use it a lot. Maybe it would even become like aubergine and something that I really really love! Do you have any tempeh recipes you love?
Is there any food that you have a similar relationship with? Something you want to or feel you really should love but can’t bring yourself to eat at all, or very rarely?
Here are some of the meals we’ve had recently.
Tempeh bolognese
Homemade pizza (this was one of my few non-vegan meals last week)
Wraps with hummus and salad vegetables in (I think I’m going to write a whole post about wraps – they are a frequent go-to in our house and allow people to be quite individual in what they put in theirs)
Pasta primavera (see mini illustrated recipe below – I love this a lot and almost always make it vegan now, but you can throw some Italian hard cheese on at the end if you want; I think I’ll probably do this as one of the monthly printable illustrated recipes, with new artwork, of course)
Thanks so much for joining me on my healthy and plant-based eating journey. The whole of July will be free, after which you’ll get 2–3 full newsletters a month for free and 2 paywalled ones that will include lovely illustrated printables. See the introduction post for more information. Next week will be the first Veg Letter, and I’m excited to see what you think of that one. If you don’t want to miss it, consider subscribing!
That’s funny. Just goes to show, though, just how much variety is available in the edible plant world! I always got teased that I was a vegetarian who didn’t like mushrooms and, while that has now changed, I still feel to have personal preferences and to just not eat the things you really dislike.
I had a big smile on my face reading this, Tasha! I find the taste of tempeh so full of flavour, mushrooms have long been a favourite before I was even eating a whole-food plant-based selection, and aubergine is on my 'meh' list of veggies. 😆
On this we're singing the same tune (so long as the tempeh doesn't accompany with those fermented bells 😉): Veggie burgers are definitely the type filled with veg and grains and goodness!
Ooh, and wraps too. Such a treat with infinite possibilities.