In front of me was a plate with a sandwich, a handful of lettuce and a slab of guacamole. The sandwich was topped with a slice of ham, two soft-boiled eggs and a plump, buttery yellow hollandaise. Indeed, I ordered eggs benedict. I punctured one of the eggs with my knife and watched as the syrupy, orange-yellow interior began to flow and mix with the sauce.
I love eggs benedict. As soon as I spot them on a menu somewhere, I don’t have to read any further. Now there is little to choose from in this tiny Barcelona joint, but that hardly matters. All customers, including myself, come there for one thing: those eggs. “You have to taste them,” a friend had sworn to me. “We were flabbergasted.”
Well, I was too. Creepy really, that’s what Asante’s eggs looked and tasted like. You should know: we are talking about a vegan lunch cafe. My eggs benedict, the ham, eggs and hollandaise sauce were one hundred percent made from plants. How on earth?
The only thing Niki, the young owner, wanted to reveal about it is that the ham was made from seitan (wheat gluten) and that the egg yolk owed its structure – a fluid sauce trapped in a jelly-like membrane – to so-called spherification. This is a process in which a liquid containing calcium chloride solidifies as soon as it comes into contact with a water bath in which sodium alginate has been dissolved (the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià learned about this at the beginning of this century). Last December, not long after I visited, Asante was named the best vegan restaurant in the world by the authoritative platform HappyCow. For a restaurant with at most four dishes on the menu, that is quite an achievement and I bet those eggs were the deciding factor.
I would prefer to share a recipe here with which you can make such eggs at home. But that becomes far too complicated. Instead, we make plant-based scrambled eggs; a lot easier and you only need a handful of ingredients. The only thing you will probably have to go out of your way to purchase is kala namak. This Indian black salt is mined in the Himalayas and has a sulphurous smell and taste, close to that of eggs. Kala namak is available at grocery stores and, contrary to what the name suggests, has a light pink color. If you can’t find it, you can also leave it out, and the silken tofu scrambled eggs will still be tasty. It just tastes a little less ‘real’.
Just because we can, we immediately make rice paper bacon with it. This is a very popular invention in vegan circles. Although you can also make vegetable bacon from tempeh, tofu or seitan, for example, rice paper produces the crispiest end result. And isn’t crispiness the raison d’être of bacon?
There are many recipes for rice paper bacon in circulation and all of them use liquid smoke, or liquid smoke flavoring. Since the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) does not consider these types of flavorings safe – manufacturers must phase out their use in the coming years – I preferred to avoid it. And after about five attempts, it worked out quite well. In any case, my children devoured the crispy bacon strips in my hands.
