Kung Pao Quorn. Click here for high-resolution version.
In Scotland, I made a very nice new food discovery: Quorn. Quorn is a meat substitute made from a fungus. It started in Europe, but Quorn is now sold in the United States. Somehow, I was never aware of Quorn, even though I discovered after returning from Scotland that Whole Foods carries Quorn, as do many local grocery stores. In the United Kingdom, Quorn seems to be easy to find, because I bought some in little Spar stores in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish islands. You’ll find it with the frozen foods (a section of the grocery store that I usually pay very little attention to).
There has been some controversy about Quorn, but I believe I won’t much get into that. Instead I’d encourage you to do your own research about Quorn, if you’re interested. You’ll want to read up on how it’s made. And you’ll want to be aware that there was a lawsuit in the United States having to do with allergies to Quorn, though I believe that only a small percentage of the population is susceptible to becoming allergic to Quorn.
Quorn is sold in several forms, including chicken substitutes in the form of nuggets and cutlets, and beef substitutes in ground-beef form. Very little is added, though, and Quorn makes no effort to trick you into thinking that it tastes like chicken, or like beef. Instead, it tastes like Quorn. The texture is dry and a bit mealy. Still, it has a pretty good bite. Like tofu, it’s all about how you sauce it or season it.
Part of the solution to making Quorn tasty — at least as a chicken substitute — is to marinate the Quorn in whatever you might use to marinate chicken. As for the beef, use it in a sauce — spaghetti sauce, for example.
Vox recently reported that up to 50 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered on factory farms each year. I don’t know about you, but I want nothing to do with that. Chickens are sweet, sociable, vulnerable, sensitive creatures. If you read up on Quorn, and if you read up on factory farms, I think you’ll at least want to give Quorn a try.
4 Comments
Nice dish 🙂
What’s the green, the red, the orange, the almond-shaped, the onion-like etc. things ??
The sauce looks like glacing 🙂
– and what would Lily, the cat think about such quorn eatings ??
The green is sweet bell pepper and green tomatoes. The red and orange also are peppers. And there are onions, and peanuts. For Kung Pao, I mix sweet and hot peppers so that there are lots of peppers but the dish is not too hot.
I don’t think Lily would think much of Quorn…
50 billion? When I was a child, it was a ritual when visiting my grandparents to lop of a head of a chicken or two to feed my grandparents grandchildren, all 11 of us. So I never thought it cruel, just sustainable, but that was a big word that didn’t exist in the 40’s.
A Walmart flyer came with my newspaper today and had Quorn listed in it. Your post was first I had heard of this.
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