Kierans Vegan Chorizo

After a few months creating weekly vegan specials in pontcannas kitchen, I was tasked with coming up with some permanent vegan additions to the menu, with the brief that they needed to be standout dishes in their own right. Taking inspiration from the ever popular Kin brioche, and a personal love of breakfast sandwiches and Spanish influenced flavours, I decided to work on something I'd always played around with, a bespoke vegan chorizo.

I'd already found a combination of spices that I used frequently to replicate the flavour of Spanish chorizo, that smokey, spicy, deep sweetness, but I needed to replicate both the denseness, and fattiness that is so unlike so many other products.

These are also qualities not easily reproduced in vegan alternatives, which meant I had to work on combining techniques and ingredients to get a hybrid result that was as close to the real thing as possible. I settled on a seitan base, which I'd played with a lot in the past, but with a high proportion of coconut oil, a fat which solidifies at room temperature, and a mix in of dried soy mince, which helped to achieve a dense texture. Once cooked, fried off, and layered in a vegan brioche with chipotle mayo, house pickles and a handmade rosti, I'd gone beyond the brief and made a product that all who tasted were astounded at how good it was as a sandwich in its own right, a welcome addition to the menu.