Marinades

Marinades separate bland cooking from restaurant-style cuisine. A well-developed marinade permeates vegetables and plant proteins, and is great for both centerpiece dishes and sides. A marinade is what begins the cooking process, using acids and salts to break down foods and produce certain textures and flavors.

Much like dumplings and bread, there’s a popular marinade in every culture. It is often the flavor of the marinade we associate with something more than the vehicle itself, and marinating is an essential technique in the vegan kitchen. For me, a marinade is like a magic potion that consists of oil, enzymes/acid, and seasonings (like salt and spices) that with time fuse and transform into an elixir that can radically alter the state of what you put in it. A marinade can start to change your ingredients and replace some naturally occurring liquids with more richly flavored ones. Items with more surface area, or more absorbency, will adopt a marinade flavor more quickly, but items with a thick skin, like eggplant, will need to be peeled or scored to aid transformation through a marinade.