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Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, April 04, 2023 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:
Hoping to learn about substitutions for nuts where nuts are used for creaminess or thickening in sauces, dressings, etc.?
— Joy Rabb
Answer:
A lot of times people find that after a lot of plant-based cooking they've been using a lot of nuts and some people decide to stop using them as much so, you know, one of the areas that I look into most for doing like a kind of a creamy like if you're doing a sauce or something like that or dressing from doing sauces a lot of times, I'll actually use something like a white bean and I'll use like a cannellini being or something like that. has a very mild flavor in it and I'll mix in like if I want the fat I'm gonna probably go for an olive oil or I might go with something like You know something with a little less flavor to it than the olive oil really kind of depending on what I'm making but if I'm doing something like a white pasta sauce or something, I'm typically going to do an olive oil to add the fat into it, but you can also look for whole fats as well. So if I was doing a dressing, I might actually use like avocado instead. But if I were doing like a white sauce the avocado would completely turn that color. So that's why I'd go with the oil. Now if you're doing something, you know in the whole food plant-based like and Forks Over Knives, you can absolutely just skip the oil completely and just do the white bean. You're just not going to get it as creamy without that fat at it into it. So you'll want to experiment a little bit with different ways to be able to get the mouth feel that you're looking for on something now as far as dressings, you know again avocado is a great one to be able to do but if you're looking for the same kind of white look tofu silk and tofu is always my go-to for addressing as well. I like to do that because it doesn't have the fat into it. They can really take on all kinds of different flavors and by adding a little bit of vinegar or lemon juice or lime juice to it adding that acid and then adding different herbs to it to be able to make it what it is and I can also do you know like that Chipotle or something like that to flavor to be able to really kind of switch up some different dips and dressings and I find Silk Tofu works for that really really well to get that kind of creaminess that I'm really looking for. You can do the same thing in a silken tofu for like a white sauce for pasta as well by adding some nutritional yeast a little garlic granules and lemon juice too. So there's some good options for you know, if you're looking to be able to do some of those plant-based sauces, but try to keep them a little bit more whole without using nuts or seeds too.
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