DIY Dinners: Dishoom vegan sausage naan (with extra bacon)
No, I have not gone vegan. Not even for the month, I’m afraid, and nor am I ever likely to.
This is not because I “couldn’t possibly imagine life without cheese”, nor because Iam a climate change denier. It is, however, because I have resolved to stop making promises that I don’t actually want to keep.
To rewind, the early hours of New Year’s Day 2020 saw myself accidentally order an Uber home to completely the wrong address, fall asleep, and pay triple figures for the pleasure of a round trip to Stratford. Who had an inkling 2020 wasn’t going to be “her year”? This girl.
In the feverish heat of the resultant hangover, I gave myself a series of self-flagellating resolutions such as “Dry January as soon as this alcohol is out of my bloodstream” and “never get an Uber again, who do you think you are, Paris Hilton?”
But by the time I’d eaten a Deliveroo-ed breakfast at 3pm, I’d already realised they were stupid. I had had no intention to quit booze before that morning – but how about I try and not-drink for a few days a week, as a compromise? Uber is very useful, particularly when you’re so drunk you can’t distinguish between postcodes on your phone... so let’s say we only get one Uber a month, and try not to get that rat-arsed again until your 30th birthday?
It is, as they say, all about balance. Within the context of dairy etc, life without cheese would make me sad, but I also don’t want the planet to burn. Over the last year or two, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much meat I eat, and the conclusion is “way too much”.
Having grown up with a meat-and-two-veg mentality etched deeply into my very British grey matter, a predilection towards the meat option is one I find particularly difficult to unlearn.
I also love the stuff. On the topic of hangovers, there is simply nothing like a bacon sandwich. It’s really quite difficult to do a bad one – I will take it in a bap or a bloomer, with butter or without, with brown sauce or ketchup, I am almost always happy.
What makes me positively ecstatic is the prospect of a Dishoom bacon naan. It needs minimal introduction, having elevated itself to the stuff of London culinary legend but, for the record, the Indian restaurant group slathers its bacon with a chilli-infused tomato sauce and cream cheese, dots it with fresh coriander sprigs and wraps it up inside one of its expertly blistered, soft naans.
Good morning: Dishoom’s vegan naan dough ft. bacon and an egg (oops)
So imagine my delight when Lockdown 1.0 saw Dishoom decide to pack all that up and send it to the doorsteps of its forlorn fans. I wouldn’t recommend trying to precisely frazzle your own naan on a proper hangover – largely due to the need to swing a screeching hot frying pan across the kitchen and into a 250+ degree oven in a matter of seconds – but it is excellent fun for relatively sober morning people.
While my love for bacon sandwiches is undying, I do have a penchant for the odd vegetarian sausage. Yes, I have been known to actually eat them voluntarily. By the time Lockdown 2.0 came around, Dishoom had teamed up with barbecue chef-turned-vegan burger producer Neil Rankin to devise a vegan sausage version of its naan kit. I know Neil, and I know he gets angry when things don’t taste good, so I was bloody thrilled.
Liking vegetarian sausages does not mean I am on board with anything pretending to be meat, or dairy for that matter. I loathe pretty much any type of nut/bean/grain-squeezed “mylk”, and I’m afraid to say the cream cheese in the vegan kit did have the approximate texture of solidified coconut oil. In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised by the vegan dough. If I had heeded the warning about the plant-based dough’s heightened tendency to go crispy and cooked them for less time, the bread would have been near-indistinguishable from the OG naan.
All slight faults are forgiven, however, thanks to the bang-on bangers. They looked like sausages, which is always a good start. Pleasingly wobbly, they were a little greyer than their meaty counterparts (owing to being made of mushrooms and fermented veg), but at least they hadn’t been needlessly made to “bleed”.
On tucking in hastily (hence the slightly rushed photos, I was hungry, forgive me), I found their texture wasn’t exactly sausage-like either, but more akin to black pudding or haggis – softer and more yielding, but still with plenty of satisfying bite. The flavour was the absolute firestarter: as bold as a blood sausage, deep in umami, unctuous even without ladles of animal fat, and ramped up to the eyeballs with warm spices and a hefty dose of pepper.
Bang-on bangers: Vegan sausages concocted by Dishoom and chef Neil Rankin
Now came the curious case of the third dough ball. In its kit for two people, Dishoom sends three vegan dough balls, one extra for “experimentation” (read, “if you’ve managed to set one of the other two on fire”). Wondering what to do with my spare, I spied a packet of bacon in the fridge and, well, what the heck else was I to do?
In short, vegan food isn’t just for vegans. In an ideal world, I would have eaten the vegan sausages with non-vegan bread and actual cheese – and I did, in fact, add an egg. I also ate the vegan bread with bacon and it was great.
And, do you know what? All these things are fine. All these combinations mean I cut out a bit of meat or dairy, which was probably good for my stomach and definitely good for the planet.
I’ve decided to not-eat meat for January, because I want to see if it has any positive effects on my wellbeing (namely my energy levels and my tumultuous gut), and also to see if and how my body craves it. If I can eat a little less of it in the future, that is probably a good thing. Oh, and I’m still eating fish, because I feel I like I want to eat more fish. That’s allowed too.
You don’t have to be “doing Veganuary” to make a positive change to how you eat and, more importantly, how you think about food. You don’t have to make absurd promises to yourself (like not having normal milk in your tea) to feel like you’ve “started the year right”. You don’t have to “give up” anything. You can just do what’s right for you.
I’m not sure how this month will go, but what I am sure of is that there is a flipping massive bacon sandwich waiting for me on the other side.
This DIY kit was supplied as a complimentary press sample.
For more information, visit dishoom.com
