veg centred cooking
There’s no getting around it - we need to reframe the way we serve meat. As chefs, we’ve come to rely on the ready availability of prime cuts of meat to create the centre-pieces of our dishes, around which the vegetables revolve.
The trouble is that this focus on large portions of prime cut meat is wasteful, environmentally damaging, and uninventive. To shift towards a truly sustainable food system, we need to use meat, and all of the amazing richness of flavour that it offers, more creatively – by using the whole animal, and utilising the flavours to complement veg-centred dishes.
This is Dan Barber’s vision of ‘The Third Plate’, outlined in his book of the same name: a reimaginging of the architecture of a plate of food. Envisioning what fine-dining could look like in 35 years, he switches the proportions of veg and meat on the plate, imagining a carrot steak with a sauce of braised second cuts of meat, rather than a beef steak with carrots on the side.
This vision of the future of food is the challenge that all forward-looking chefs must now take up: how can we make our menus veg-led, and incorporate meat in ways that support great farming, rather than relying on the broken system of factory-farmed meat, and all its terrible consequences? This question is what inspired Noma’s veg season:
Asking what it would look like to embrace true seasonality, the team at Noma decided to focus on celebrating the abundance of the plant kingdom during peak cropping season in their native Denmark. From May to September, their menu was entirely veg-led.
A scoby ‘steak’, @nomacph
Grilled lions mane mushroom, @nomacph
However, on making this commitment, they realised that chefs in the West don’t have a model for totally vegetarian menus! So, they set to work on devising vegetarian menus that were still packed with flavour. Here, they align with Dan Barber’s vision of using big, meaty flavours to accentuate veg-led dishes: by focussing on fermenting and preserving animal-derived products, they were able to create totally unique flavours, like chicken wing garam, that they use to add depth of flavour to their veg-centred dishes. This is the kind of innovation that we as chefs need to come up with in order to create unique, flavourful menus that support truly ecological food systems.
Can restaurants save money using more plants better meat?
Meat raised through agroecological practices currently comes at a higher cost than industrially produced meat. However, if the negative externalities of industrial meat production—such as its impact on people and the environment—were factored into its price, this cost difference would shift significantly. In the meantime, using smaller quantities of higher-quality meat and making vegetables the focal point of dishes doesn’t have to result in financial losses for restaurants.
The Bull Inn in Totnes describes itself as a "veg-first" restaurant. Head Chef Johnny Tillbrook shared that using smaller portions of meat creates room to invest in higher-quality meat. A little meat flavour can go a long way.
Here are two examples of veg-centered cooking—a delicious reimagining of the standard plate of food. You can be part of this movement! Share your dishes that align with this approach, and we’ll help spread the word about your creations.