About recipe testing August 18, 2009

I get asked a lot of questions about how I got into recipe testing and what it involves, so I thought I’d do a post about it and my experiences testing.

It started for me quite by chance. Joni was writing a burger book, and I posted a question on the PPK forum about vegan burgers. She asked me if I’d be interested in testing for her book, and since I’d already enjoyed some of things I’d tried from her first book, I went for it. If you’ve been reading my blog a while, you’ll know that Friday night became burger night on our house, and we really enjoyed picking one out each week. (Joni, if you’re reading this, when is it coming out?)

Then I really hit lucky when Isa asked for testers for her new book Vegan Brunch. I was honoured to be chosen, and loved doing all that testing. After that Joni asked if I’d help out with another project with Celine, for a mammoth project, 500 Vegan Recipes. That testing whizzed by; those girls had a really tight deadline and cranked out recipes so quickly that I didn’t test as much I’d have liked. Then came Terry’s Vegan Latina, then Tami’s Vegan American Kitchen, and now Isa’s new Healthy Vegan book. So I’m a busy tester right now! It’s months since I’ve eaten an evening meal which wasn’t a tester.

Here’s some questions I get asked:

1. So how do you actually do it?
The authors have a website, usually a discussion forum but sometimes a blog, that’s password protected for testers. They post a recipe and we go away and work at it. Then we give feedback about how long it took, whether we liked it, how many people it served, how we’d change it etc. Then the recipe either gets tweaked, changed, or after a certain amount of tests, gets closed for testing.

2. Do you get paid?
Ha! No. I get a copy of the book.

3. So why on earth do you do it?
Well, I love cooking, but I don’t really have much inspiration to create my own recipes. I love the idea of feeding into a project. I hate books with mistakes, or when its obvious that the recipes haven’t been tested properly. And I love making friends with the authors and other testers too. I’ve done some great food parcel swaps so that we can all have access to the ingredients we need. And it means we eat something different every single night!

4.Can anyone do it?
Well, anyone in theory could, but here’s a list of things I think you need to bear in mind if offering or planning to test recipes.

• Flexibility. Recipes sometimes appear in a big rush all at once, and sometimes not for a while. You might need to change your meal plans at the last minute.
• Cost. It isn’t cheap! You might sometimes need just a spoonful of an ingredient you don’t normally buy, or go to a few different shops to track something down. You’ve got to be cunning with leftovers too or you start to waste stuff.
• Feedback. You need to be clear in your own mind about the difference between you not liking something and it not actually working. This is really important. Not everyone can love everything and you need to learn to say so, but when to know it’s probably just your tastebuds.
• Precision. Your oven temperature needs to be right, you need to weigh and measure things properly, you can’t just throw in a load of extra things like you normally might. And you need to think very carefully about making substitutions and how it affects the test. All the authors I’ve tested for are American, so I’ve learnt a lot about different names for UK ingredients! And something which is really difficult for me to get, is very easy for them (say, tempeh, or liquid smoke).
• Techniques. If I’m just following a recipe from a book I just do it from the instructions. But I’ve noticed that the most common mistake authors make is listing an ingredient then not referring to it, or vice versa. So now I get all the ingredients on the counter first so that I can easily notice if something isn’t used.
• Chance of failure. Of course if you are testing a recipe, there’s probably more chance of it not working than if you pick one from a book. I made Isa’s omelette from Vegan Brunch at least 4 times before I got it to work, so I had a few meals of broken up omelette type stuff. But you take the rough with the smooth and its great when it eventually does work!

But I love testing, I’ve loved everything I’ve done. It’s made me a better cook, given me access to tonnes of new recipes, has introduced me to loads of great people, made me become a big part of the vegan community and given us lots of new things to eat and discuss at home. I owe a huge thanks to all you authors and co testers who continue to inspire me!

Here’s a few pictures of things I have been testing recently.

Vegan Brunch – get it pre-ordered NOW! May 4, 2009

I was very fortunate to test a whole load of recipes from this book and I’m here to tell you that they have all been incredible. I did blog about some of them but by no means all. You can find the blog posts by clicking on “Crack of Noon” on the right of this page. If you’re wondering, that was going to be the original title of the book, but the publishers decided to change it. I can see why, but I quite liked “Crack of Noon” – It does still bring some very interesting search phrases to my blog too!

Now, I’m a savoury person at all times, and especially at breakfast time, so the savoury dishes were all my favourites. The pierogi, the breakfast casserole, the beer battered tofu, the cornbread waffles, the leek and mushroom pie, courico tacos with pineapple salsa, ethiopian lentil pancakes – they’ve all been repeated several times in my house. But if you love sweet foods, don’t worry – you’re catered for too. Lemon poppyseed muffins, banana rabanada, gingerbread waffles, pain au chocolat – and many more. Add in the basic breakfast essentials such as bagels, omelettes, muffins (the sensible English kind), bacon and hashbrowns, and this is a brunch encyclopedia that you can’t be without. Not a morning person? Never fear – many of the dishes can be made in advance and of course there’s nothing to stop you eating them at any time of the day!

It’s available for pre-order on Amazon right now. What on earth is stopping you?

What does a vegan eat for Christmas? December 28, 2008

We have our main Christmas meal on Christmas Eve as we like to go out on Christmas Day and eat Indian food. It’s become our tradition – it’s our favourite food and if we can’t eat our favourite food on Christmas Day when can we?

I don’t really care for roast type dinners so Christmas Eve is the only time of year when we have one. We usually have a light starter and this year I picked the Greek style courgette fritters from Veganomicon. I thought they were the highlight of the meal – light, fresh and tasty.

For the main course I decided to make the meatloaf that was featured in the free digital edition of VegNews (it doesn’t link properly but if you google VegNews then go to Subscribe you will find it). It was a very meaty loaf made with rice, lentils, mushrooms and lots of herbs and veg. It’s basted with a smoky tomato sauce which actually I thought was a bit overpowering and next time I’d halve the sauce. Still, it held together well, was easy to slice and tasted fantastic in a sandwich later on! I served it with roast potatoes, leeks, green beans, roast potatoes, stuffing, yorkshire pudding, bread sauce and gravy. My Yorkshire puds were a bit cakey, despite following the exact same recipe which worked perfectly last year. I made the stuffing up as I went along but I used a couple of Realeat veggie sausages with lots of celery, onion, garlic, sage, thyme and breadcrumbs. It was delicious. This is a picture before I attacked it with gravy:

On Christmas Day I made US style biscuits with gravy. I use the VWAV biscuit recipe, and served them with smoked almond gravy which is a really tasty gravy from the new brunch book. I’ve said it before but I really can’t understand why we haven’t embraced biscuits and gravy over here. They’re a wonderful start to the day!

We went to a local South Indian restaurant, Hanging Mangoes, for our main meal. It’s only a small place but it was quite busy with local Indian families spending Christmas there. I’ve only got a decent picture of the masala dosa, but we also ate chilli fried idli, cauliflower 65, dhal, spinach masala, vegetable noodles and coconut rice. Delicious as it always is!

So Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were filled with delicious food and wine with more to come over new year. Yes, we vegans really suffer at Christmas time!

Muffins November 23, 2008

Tester for Vegan Brunch. Gorgeous.

Cranberries November 22, 2008

I don’t remember eating cranberries before and this week I’ve had them twice! Normally, in this country anyway, cranberries are only ever seen in a jar of sticky sweet sauce which usually goes with turkey. As I haven’t eaten turkey for well over 20 years, I don’t think I’ve had cranberries in that time either. I did have cranberry vodka a few times when i lived in Russia but I don’t suppose that counts.

Both of the ways I ate cranberries this week are test recipes. The first one is cranberry, orange and pecan muffins from Vegan Brunch (formerly called Crack of Noon). These suited me down to the ground as you probably know by now that I don’t care for sweet foods and these are nicely sharp, yet balanced with sugar and orange.

I’ve also been lucky enough to be asked to test for another new cookbook – I don’t think I’m allowed to say who for yet – and I think a lot of my cooking will be tests for that bok in the near future! The first one I chose to test was a cranberry chilli. The picture doesn’t do it justice at all but it was very tasty, nicely sour with a kick of tequila and chilli in it. I served it with Veganomicon cornbread.

Cranberries must surely be healthy; they were certainly tasty in both of these extremely different recipes! Shame we only ever get them here for a few weeks over Christmas!

Toasted coconut and mango muffins October 31, 2008

It’s the very last day of VeganMoFo today and it’ll also be my 20th MoFo post. I’ve been out a few times this week and eaten a few old favourites which I’ve already blogged about, so nothing of interest there.

So out of desperation for something to write about – I made muffins! These are tester muffins for Isa’s brunch book and I’d made them before as testers and really liked them. I very rarely bake – it’s too precise for me and goes against my usual “pinch of this, pinch of that” attitude! I also don’t really like sweet food much and I’d always far rather fill up on main courses than eat muffins in between meals. But I’ll get an occasional urge for something nice to eat with a cup of tea and today was that day.

The really nice thing about this recipe is that it uses dried mango so you can have a lovely sunshine muffin flavour even on the last day of October when it’s dark and cold.

I’ve really enjoyed doing MoFo this year but the hardest part about it has been keeping up with all the wonderful posts on all the other blogs out there. There are so many creative, intelligent vegan bloggers out there and my google reader has been bulging at the seams with brilliant ideas, gorgeous photographs and delicious looking recipes. So even though I’ll be back to my usual rate of blogging from now, I’ll be busy catching up with all the great recipes I’ve missed!!

VeganMoFo: Mom’s breakfast casserole October 22, 2008

This was a tester from Isa’s brunch book quite a while ago, and we really loved it.

Tonight we had a friend visiting and I was wondering what to cook. She’s actually a perfect food friend. She loves good food and she’s not vegan nor even vegetarian. But she’s got an open mind and is happy to try most things, so she’ll say if she doesn’t like it but it’s good news if she does, because she’ll eat vegan food with just the same open mind as if she’s eating a new type of fish.

Anyway, when I was scouring the fridge and the cupboards I came up with 2 meals – VCON chickpeas romesco with saffron rice and greens, or the brunch book casserole with smoky greens. I love both meals but obviously most of the time if the person you’re cooking isn’t vegan you’re not sure about offering them tofu, tempeh and cheeze sauce in one meal. But my husband insisted that she’d like to try the other dish so I went for it.

Anyway, we all enjoyed it, and afterwards I asked my friend what she thought. She really wasn’t sure – she knew she enjoyed it but wasn’t sure what some of the tastes were. I tried to pin her down and eventually I managed to get her to say that she had no idea tofu could taste like that – it wasn’t like wagamama tofu at all. By the way I poured VCON cheeze sauce over the top, but the book also recommends some vegan cheeses you can use.

I suppose I have 2 points here. The first one is that Isa’s brunch book is brilliant so buy it. The second is never underestimate your friends, and don’t think that they might not like certain foods just because they’re vegan. You end stereotyping people’s tastes just as much as we normally hate them doing about us if you do.

Pumpkin two ways October 12, 2008

Pumpkins aren’t available here much. And I’m not sure I love them enough to be bothered to tackle the whole ones you can get in the run up to Halloween. But in Calais they were selling them already cut up in chunks so I decided to get a piece.

The first dish I tried was this risotto. I have a huge sage bush rampaging through my garden and I love it so I’m always on the look out for ways to use it. I wasn’t overly thrilled by this dish though. I guess it’s supposed to have a subtle flavour but I don’t really do subtle and I had to add a tonne of Yellow Rose Recipes vegan parmesan to enjoy it.

I had some pumpkin leftover. Not really enough to be the key ingredient in a main course but enough not to waste.

Brunch testing has gone very quiet recently. I think Isa is getting the manuscript finished and sorted out and has posted most of the recipes. But I remembered seeing a pumpkin french toast which hadn’t been tested too much so I decided to give it a go.

Pumpkin is one of those vegetables (or fruits) which gets used far more and in totally different ways in America. It seems to be used in both sweet and savoury dishes, unlike here. It even gets sold, ready pureed, in tins!! I’m still not fully tuned in to the ways sweet and savoury things turn up on the same plate in America by the way – especially at breakfast time. You will find tempeh bacon on the same plate as pancakes, fruit and tofu scramble, and other even weirder combinations. Anyway, in this dish the pumpkin is pureed with non dairy milk and spices, and used as the batter for french toast. I served it with sorghum molasses and some cashew cream (cashews blended with water, icing sugar and lemon zest). It was a really nice brunch and made a change!

Gingerbread waffles and care packages September 23, 2008

This was another test recipe for Isa’s brunch book. It’s a testament to how good it was that a) I was a bit drunk when I made it b) my measuring cups were in the dishwasher and c) I didn’t have quite enough plain flour and had to use some bread flour – and yet it was still the nicest waffle I have ever eaten. The whole house smelt like a gingerbread house; the waffle wasn’t sweet; it was just lovely and spicy. To add insult to injury, my husband realised it went really well with a glass of calvados. There was no going back from that point.

I served the waffles with vanilla Swedish Glace ice-cream and sorghum molasses. Yep, that’s right. I’d never heard of it either until the previous day, when the wonderful Johnp sent me a southern US care package. Southern US food really intrigues me. It’s almost as far removed from English food as, say, Chinese food. And when you don’t understand a cuisine, it’s doubly difficult to get to grips with vegan versions. The rest of the package includes 3 different barbecue sauces, grits, boiled peanuts, black eyed peas and hominy. And I know you are wondering, the sorghum molasses is wonderful, and perfect with the waffles.

Ethiopian crepes with potato salad coleslaw August 26, 2008

This was another test recipe for the new brunch book. I’ve enjoyed testing so much but one of the best things about it is that its made me try recipes I probably wouldn’t have done had I just bought the book.

Both coleslaw and potato salad are not things I eat very often. I think I’ve been put off coleslaw by that little mound of cheap and nasty onion dominated vinegary vegetables that turns up all over the place. This one includes toasted cumin seeds, no onion, and is a lovely lively zingy accompaniment to the rich, spicy, earthy lentils – made into an impressive looking meal by being wrapped in crepes.

We both thoroughly enjoyed this meal – the coleslaw was perfect with the crepes and it’s always good to try new ways with lentils.