Vegan weekend adventures in Ottawa fall 2023

Image
The fall season in Ottawa is a few weeks so you have to enjoy it. This summer was mostly rainy but it was heat wave weather at the end September straight to the colder windy days of October. If you are new to my blog I have lived most of my life in Vancouver and moved to Ottawa last year. I moved to Ottawa with my mom and last fall was dealing with her pancreatic cancer so I didn’t have time to enjoy Ottawa fall things. My mom passed away last October and this year I didn’t have many commitments which left me time to explore the Ottawa beauty and vegan food.  There really isn’t enough time to explore everything and work there is always something going on. I have also gone from not having much of a social life to having to vegan friends in the last couple of months. The beauty of Ottawa is it really is a big city small town at least in the vegan market community. Hotpotatoco one of the vendors at the market introduced me to one of my vegan friends that will be known as the other vegan g

Vegan hollandaise substitute



 

I only became vegan a year ago and one of my favourite things when I was vegetarian was hollandaise sauce. There are no restaurants near where I live that serve vegan hollandaise and the ones I have tried in the past were not even close to being a regular hollandaise. 

A long time ago I worked in restaurants. One of the restaurants would get hollandaise as a powder. I have not seen any commercial vegan hollandaise sauce in stores near me. I went in search of an accidentally vegan hollandaise powder but I couldn’t find any. 

In another restaurant I worked at we made the hollandaise from scratch and I remember the process being similar to making mayonnaise except using butter and whisking over heat. My next option was to attempt to make a homemade version. I didn’t know where to start could I use a vegan mayo as a base? 

I looked up some recipes they had common ingredients mustard, turmeric, black salt, and lemon I had all of these except lemon. There were different variations using nutritional yeast, tofu, vegan cream cheese but when I saw the one that used cashews I thought perfect. I have living tree foods cream cheese it’s garlic and chive flavour but that is okay. 


I got out the ingredients I thought might work. I didn’t have much of the cream cheese or vegan mayo left so I thought I would combine the two. The recipes I saw said to blend hot water with the ingredients. I put too much water in so I went to look for something to thicken it with. I added nutritional  yeast it was still to thin. I found Tofutti sour cream in my fridge and it was perfect. I added everything to the magic bullet and blended.

It tastes okay but was to watery and I felt it was missing something. As I was debating on heating it up to thicken it I realized the whole point of hollandaise is to eat butter. I melted vegan butter in the pan and slowly heated the mixture up while stirring. 

The consistency was good but the flavour still wasn’t right. I am trying to use up my smoked paprika and dried parsley so I added that salt and pepper. The taste was good but a lemon would have helped. 

The taste and texture are good not exactly like a hollandaise but a pretty good substitute. Recipe below let me know if you try it. 

Recipe 

2 TBSP cashew cream cheese 

1 TBSP vegan mayo 

2 TBSP vegan sour cream 

1/4 cup vegan butter 

1 tsp turmeric powder 

1 tsp mustard 

1/2 cup warm water 

I/4 tsp black salt (kala namak)

A few drops hot sauce (optional)

A squeeze of lemon 

Spices -whatever you like 

Salt and pepper 

Blend everything except vegan butter in a blender I used a magic bullet. In a pan over low medium heat melt butter. Add blended mixture while stirring over heat for a few minutes sauce will thicken as it cooks. Once sauce boils take off heat. Let cool to thicken, 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Recovery Six months after Uterine Fibroid Embolization (UFE)

My experience having a Uterine Fibroid Embolization

Fibroids, Ultrasound, MRI and UFE during a pandemic