Vegetarian Meat Pie
Every year when my birthday comes around, I have a little gathering, based around a particular theme. Here you can see my “French degustation” theme from last year. Here you can see my Greco-Roman theme from the previous year. This year the theme was gourmet-ified Aussie food. So above you can see my vegetarian meat pie. I purposely didn’t tell people that it was vegetarian until they’d eaten it – and they were appropriately fooled!
There were two main things that contributed to this daring trick: 1) the use of Quorn (a protein-based meat substitute); and 2) the use of a variety of sources of umami flavour – such as tomato paste, chanterelle mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, parmesan cheese, vegemite, wakame seaweed, and a number of other ingredients. I simmered it away in red wine for an hour, and then put the mixture into parmesan shortcrust pastry, with butter puff pastry tops.
Try it – you will not fail to fool the most carnivorous meatlover!
