Perfect Pita Bread

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

 

Recipe: see page 78 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

This pita bread recipe was awesome. It is a huge difference eating homemade pita bread, rather than that stuff from the store, which I never like because it falls apart as soon as you start loading in the sandwich filling. When the pitas are fresh they are stretchier, they smell nicer, and they just taste better.

This recipe has the same ingredients as the Whole Grain Burger Buns on page 92, but with the addition of a little bit of vital wheat gluten, which is what gives this bread its stretchiness. So, if you are going to make one of these recipes, you might as well try the other.

The other reason I really liked this recipe is that it has a shorter prep time than regular loaf-type breads. It was only a few minutes of kneading, waiting for the rise (okay, that took awhile), and the baking time was less than 5 minutes. Watching the pitas bake was interesting. The oven is very hot and these look like tortillas when they go inside, but at around the 2-minute mark they start to puff up like balloons.

Ingredients: whole spelt flour, whole wheat flour, vital wheat gluten, molasses, water, active dry yeast, salt, oil.

Baked Seitan Enchiladas

This recipe is from the cookbook Vegan Fire and Spice by Robin Robertson.

Recipe: see page 30 of Vegan Fire and Spice.

This vegan enchilada recipe came together quickly, which was a relief. I haven't had much time lately to try new recipes from my cookbooks.

The ingredients for the filling were grilled for a bit before being rolled in flour tortillas and placed in a baking dish. The taste was fairly mild, so I kept a bottle of Sriracha on hand to spice things up. The only thing I didn't like is that the tortillas became very mushy after I pulled the dish out of the oven.

It kind of reminded me of the chewiness of steamed wontons. I think that came from all the moisture in the salsa and sour cream. It cooked out in the oven and soaked into the tortillas. If I make these again I may try leaving out them out as ingredients in the filling, and just use them as a condiment served at the table.

Ingredients: red onion, green bell pepper, garlic, chili powder, mild tomato salsa, vegan sour cream, seitan, flour tortillas, canola oil.

Whole Grain Burger Buns

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

Recipe: see page 92 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

This was a fairly easy recipe to make. It was the first time I've ever made yeast bread by hand and not used a bread machine to do the kneading. The recipe calls for molasses or barley malt syrup as the sugar. I couldn't find barley malt syrup, so I went with the molasses, which gave the burger buns a strong aroma and flavor. It made the kitchen smell like gingerbread cookies.

I don't know if the tomato, pickles and Morningstar Grillers Vegan burger I put on the bun were a good match with the molasses flavor. That flavor was especially strong while the buns were still warm from the oven. I saved some for the following day, and the flavor seemed more muted. I liked that much more.

Good recipe. I'll definitely make it again.

Ingredients: whole spelt flour, whole wheat flour, molasses, water, active dry yeast, salt, oil.

Wholesome Vanilla Pound Cake

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

Recipe: see page 149 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

Traditional pound cake gets its name from the fact that it takes a pound each of the ingredients of butter, flour, sugar and eggs. Of course, vegans don't eat butter or eggs, so I thought this would be an interesting recipe to try. It worked out well and was very tasty. It was sweet and dense, and smelled like lemon, vanilla and coconut.

Ingredients: vanilla-flavored vegan yogurt (So Delicious used here), maple syrup, coconut oil, vanilla extract, cornstarch, whole wheat pastry flour, cooking spray, salt, baking powder, lemon zest.

Pretty and Wheaty Pretzels

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

 

Recipe: see page 79 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

I messed up this recipe a bit. First, I've never made pretzels before so I was kind of excited, and I got a little carried away with the pretzel salt. I've never used that before, and it makes the pretzels look pretty. The recipe said to use just enough to cover the tops, but I may have interpreted that too liberally.  I had to brush most of it off before eating them because it made the pretzels too salty for my tastes.

The other critical part of making pretzels is to dunk them in boiling water before placing them on a sheet to bake in the oven. The water has baking soda in it, and I ended up putting 2x more baking soda in the bath than the recipe called for. That really made them salty. I was supposed to use a large saucepan that held 8 cups of water, but my largest only holds 4. I didn't think through that little math problem.

Part of the recipe calls for dissolving the yeast in the coconut milk, and that was kind of weird too. The yeast clumped up and wouldn't dissolve, so I stuck my hands in to try to break it up, and that just made my hands sticky with the wet yeast. I was sure these weren't going to rise, and surprised these came out as well as they did.

The pretzels have a short baking time at a high temperature. That makes them soft and chewy. I was looking around the internet and noticed that recipes for crunchy pretzels tend to have a longer baking time at a lower temperature. I guess that makes the pretzel dry out. This is a good recipe for soft pretzels.

Regardless of how I messed up, I think the photo gives you a good idea of what the recipe looks like.

Ingredients: white whole wheat flour, maple syrup, canned light coconut milk, active dry yeast, fine sea salt, pretzel salt, baking soda, cooking spray, water.

'Noochy' Crackers

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

Recipe: see page 111 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

I was a little wary of this recipe because I've never tried making vegan crackers, but these turned out very nice. The 'noochy' in the recipe name is a reference to nutritional yeast, which is often used in vegan recipes to give a cheese-style taste. I thought these crackers had a savory flavor, but weren't particularly cheesy. So if you are one of those people who is put off by the taste of nutritional yeast, I don't think you would notice it in these crackers. More than anything, the flavor of the crackers reminded me of a pot pie crust... but with the texture of a cracker.

I've made this recipe twice and have had problems rolling out the crackers to an even consistency. There is a note about that in the instructions because that affects the baking time. The thicker the cracker, the longer it takes, and that's fine as long as they are all the same thickness. But trying to bake thick and thin at the same time is tricky. On that first batch the thin ones burned and the thick ones never got crispy. They were more like biscuits.

These held together nicely and were very quick to prepare too.

Ingredients: whole spelt flour, whole wheat pastry flour, nutritional yeast, dried cilantro, black pepper, salt, oil, water.