October is Vegetarian Awareness month.
Here are 5 tips on ways to make delicious vegetarian dishes.
Sweet, sour, salty, umami flavours
- When creating dishes, look to create these sensations in the mouth in order to tantalize your taste buds.
- The sweet flavour can come from using fruit, honey, palm sugar, coconut sugar or sweet tasting vegetables.
- Sour foods come from using lemon juice, tamarind, tomatoes (can be sweet or sour), apple cider vinegar.
- The salt flavour may come from foods such as seaweed, soya sauce, Tamarin sauce, Himalayan salt.
- Lastly, umami flavour comes from certain foods such as mushrooms, asparagus, sweet potato, Chinese cabbage, carrots, avocados, soya beans.
- An example would be when cooking a Moroccan curry, the sweetness comes from using coconut milk.
- Adding in preserved lemon can increase the sourness as well as the salt and adding vegetables like mushrooms and sweet potato creates that umami experience.
Where is the texture?
- Are you in the mood for something with a smooth texture or crunchy?
- Adding variety to a meal is important as it gives you different sensations in the mouth.
- Add some power and improve satiety
- Bring in protein-based foods and healthy fats.
- Tossing in protein-based foods such as beans, pulses, legumes, tofu etc. and healthy fats including avocados, nuts, seeds and olive oil creates a lovely mouthfeel, but also increases satiety.
Toast the seeds to give variety
- Make an avocado and lemon dressing and add to a delicious, crunchy salad.
- Roast, griddle, bake, pan fry
- Using different styles of cooking can add to the deliciousness of the food.
- Try roasting your veg then tossing in the chickpeas and toasted seeds or griddle your aubergine to enhance the flavour of the dish.
Spice or herb it up
- Spices and herbs create so much flavour in a dish.
- Adding spices such as cumin, coriander, cardamom, chili, turmeric, fenugreek or paprika will make a worthwhile vegetarian meal.