Do you think vegan food is boring? Or just not good? If so, you haven’t seen the delicious potential that healthy vegan food has. In this video I’m sharing 5 tips for making your vegan meals taste amazing.
If you’d prefer to read, here’s the transcript.
Maybe you’re wondering, “How in the heck do I make my vegan food taste good?” I often hear that question from my coaching clients and from readers and members of my Black Vegan Academy Facebook Group. Today I’m going to share with you five tips for making sure your vegan food is amazing.
Here’s my 5 top tips for making amazing tasting food.
Tip #1 Blend and Balance The Five Flavors
Those flavors are sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami or savory. You want to have at least a little bit of each of those five flavors in most dishes. Even desserts often times need a little bit of salt just to kick that flavor up a notch.
When you taste something and it doesn’t have that life, it doesn’t have that zest that you want, think about which of those flavors you might need to add to your dish to make it taste better.
For salt you can add: soy sauce, miso, olives, fermented food like sauerkraut, or seaweed.
For sweet you can add: sugar, raisins, dates, sweet fruit, sweet vegetables like carrots.
For the sour add: Lemon or lime juice, citrus fruit, vinegars.
For bitter add: Bitter herbs like parsley or bitter greens like arugula or mustard greens.
For savory add: mushrooms, garlic, onions, hot peppers or some herbs.
By combining all of these five flavors, the sugar, the salt, the sour, the bitter, the savory, your dishes will have multi layers of flavor and will be much more satisfying. Sometimes it’s not even in the dish but on the plate so maybe your meal has one dish that’s a little sweeter another that’s a little more salty more sour etc.
Tip #2 Get familiar with spices and herbs and start building your spice cabinet.
You want to have things like cumin, turmeric, curry powders, chili powders, dried herbs cinnamon. There are so many spices and herbs.
Every time you go to the market pick up something new that you haven’t used before. Or, as you’re looking at recipes that use spices you don’t have, add those to your shopping list.
There are so many amazing spices that will really make your food taste delicious. Check out this post for more.
Tip #3 Incorporate international seasoning and international flavor combinations.
There are many very delicious flavorful foods from all around the world. From Ethiopia, from West Africa, from from South America and Mexico, from Asia, Chinese, Thailand.
Each one uses different combinations of spices, herbs, seasonings, and ingredients to make their food have its distinctive taste.
Check out this video to learn more about how to make different international flavor combinations.
Tip #4 Learn how to make your own vinaigrette dressing.
Salads are probably going to be a good portion of what you eat. Having some delicious dressing will totally make the difference and provide variety. The dressings can be much more flavorful and healthy if you make them yourself. And they’re really very easy to make. You can make them in five minutes or less.
You can use many different things to make them taste different each time. Different vinegars, citrus juice, different herbs, different, spices. You can have a whole range of great salad dressings. They work really good as a marinade too. You can use it to soak broccoli or mushrooms or things like that.
Here’s how to make your own vinaigrette dressing.
Tip #5 Use seaweed to add a seafood flavor.
There are many types of seaweed. Use nori, wakame, dulse,etc. Add the seaweed to your nut pates, to your soups, to salads and more to give your food a bit of a seafood taste.
But do make sure that you look for Atlantic seaweed. We try to avoid the Pacific seaweeds because of all the radiation that’s been still continually coming out from the Fukushima accident that happened a number of years ago.
So, those are my five tips for making your vegan meals taste amazing.
For even more ideas you can download my free guide, Unlocking The Secrets to a Flavor Filled Vegan Kitchen.
And get recipes that utilize these ideas in my recipe book Food For The Soul From Ama’s Kitchen. It’s available on Amazon in Kindle and Print. Or here on this site for a PDF or EPub format.
Which of these tips will you try first? Got tips of your own? Leave a comment below.
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