When you're a food editor at Epi, youwork and work and workon a recipe, trying to get it as perfect and easy-to-re-create as possible. But here's the ironic thing: If the recipe is any good, everybody will try to change it. Adventurous cooks will add things. Timid eaters will leave something out. And those with allergies or food restrictions will adapt the recipe for their diet.
My recipe forVegducken—a vegetable-based spin on the Thanksgiving turkducken—has only been around for one week, but Epi readers are already making it their own. They've postedversions with bisonandgooseberry, suggested adding everything from sun-dried tomatoes to chickpeas, and have proposed numerous ways torename the dish. (ButterEggChini, Zuccalionsquaplant, Vegsquashen, and Plant Dinner are all contenders.)
But across the board, the most requested change to the Vegducken (sorry, the name is no longer up for debate) is that it become vegan. And luckily for the vegan community, it can—and it only takes three easy steps.
1. Swap Out The Butter
To infuse flavor into the original Vegducken, I brushed the layers with a maple-thyme-chili butter. With a handful of herbs and a squeeze of lemon juice, this butter also becomes the Vegducken's finishing sauce. But both the basting sauce and the finishing sauce work just as well if you substitute vegetable oil for the butter. (Some readers have also suggested coconut oil and a vegan butter substitute,such as Earth Balance. Those ideas work, too.)
2. Take Out the Eggs
The eggs in the Vegducken are there for one reason, and that's to hold the vegetable stuffing together. Instead of eggs, try using another excellent binder: finely ground flax seeds. To replace 1 egg, combine1 Tbsp. ground flaxseedwith3 Tbsp. water. You can also try outEgg Replacer.
3. Mix Up the Cheese
For this stuffing, I followed the classic French technique for mushroomduxelles, adding grated Parmesan cheese for both its binding qualities and its salty flavor. You can simply skip the cheese for a vegan Vegducken (add a little more salt to the stuffing) or use avegan parmesan.
