Non Vegan Research Material

Food for Thought

Low Carb Vegan Charcuterie

An Italy Inspired Take for Plant-Based Cuisine

To develop a vegan charcuterie concept, I needed a baseline reference point, as they say in science and statistics, which provided enough of an excuse to go to Italy.

Here’s a great thing about being a North American in the Mediterranean — our daily routine clocks are set very differently. I am an early to bed, and early to rise (to walk the dog) lad. So, as I am going to bed around 10pm, in Spain they are just heading out to dinner! I guess their dogs get walked a bit later in the morning than mine :)

Meet Cabo, he’s my official vegan taste tester. While he isn’t vegan — being a pure carnivore — I take it as a sign of cooking and meal prep success when he tries to steal my vegan food:

Cabo, a pure meat eating Bernedoodle whom I routinely dupe into eating vegan food. Putin has his taste testers for different reasons; I have Cabo to see if my food might be appealing to non-vegans :)

One thing that’s great about wandering around the trendy Trastevere neighborhood south of the Vatican in Rome — with my North American biological timetable — is that come late afternoon or early evening, I can get entire rooms at wine bars all to myself!

Trastevere neighborhood, Rome.

Is there a better place to conduct research into vegan cuisine, and chill out drinking a whole bottle of Chianti over a couple hours of notetaking? It really did feel, for a few hours at least, that I had a whole room at Essenza Wine Bar all to myself, with its staff at my beck and call. I thought of them as my lab assistants, and also as friendly people to chat with. I presume they were working hard to get ready for when the crowds would come, which would be long after I left the place.

Thank you North American daily timetable, you get me whole wine bars to myself in the Med!

Significant components of my baseline Italian charcuterie were plant-based, or easily made plant-based: the bread (which can be found in low carb versions, such as the Carbonaut brand), the olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping it in, the honey, the wine (which in Italy, can be bought at 10 euros a bottle, since they don’t have a North American style sin tax on fermented grape juice), and it is very easy today to find an ever-expanding variety of vegan cheeses.

That leaves the meat part, but what is the role of meat in a charcuterie, besides offering protein? It has been said that all vodkas taste the same, and that they differ only in their body, because there’s not much else in vodka beyond alcohol and water.

That also sums up my culinary philosophy when it comes to plant-based protein replacements for meat in traditional cuisines. Cured meats can have salty, umami, smoky, sweet, spice, herb and fermentation notes, along with some fatty richness. That’s a good list of flavor elements to replicate in exploring plant-based meat alternatives.

You can get some of this from store-bought vegan cold cuts, I guess, but they are meant to be hidden between slices of bread and not displayed artistically face up on a charcuterie board visual composition. A fast and easy trick I came up with to get a lot of these cured meat flavors into a vegan version — which Cabo felt was well worth exploring with his nose — was to just boil some thinly sliced seitan (‘wheat meat’) in a small sauce pan with water, marmite, a bit of coconut oil, monk fruit and an herb spice blend.

Add and arrange my patented ‘cured meat wheat meat — which admittedly, isn’t so thinly sliced as I will try in my next version , and I didn’t really attempt a smooth planar surface, either— to dollops of honey and Dijon mustard, some vegan cheese slices (at least two colors!), sliced pickles, olives, toasted low carb bread with their crusts removed, and for dipping these, flavor infused olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and you get something that holds up well as a low carb vegan charcuterie.

This provides a lot of opportunities to mix and match flavors, for instance by combining a bit of seitan, honey and pickle, or cheese, bread and oil, or olive and honey, and so on. There are actually a lot more combinatorial possibilities with my version compared to the Italian baseline.

A low carb vegan charcuteri.

You can of course minimize the carbs by using (or eating) less of the honey, and same goes with the cheese and fat. This charcuterie goes great with wine, naturally, and looks especially cool with toothpicks held stylishly in a Polish crystal shot glass.

Buon appetito!

Ciao.