Vegan Bolognese

Yesterday was Vegan Vednesday, and I tried a new recipe: "Vegan Bolognese With Mushrooms and Walnuts" (NYT Cooking; subscription required). We all decided the result was "fine," and given that it was a lot of work to produce something "fine," I cannot recommend this.

I made two ingredient substitutes, but even had I followed the ingredient list precisely, I predict the results would still have been "fine." The first substitution was nutritional yeast flakes for Marmite. The second was white wine for red.

I can sense some of you oenophiles freaking out about the wine. OF COURSE reds and whites aren't interchangeable, you're thinking, as tannin-scented steam comes out of your ears. But is that really true? IS IT?? 

I offer you this humorous 19-year-old piece from The New Yorker that I loved and have never forgotten. It is by Calvin Trillin, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. The article revolves around a blind taste test that is the stuff of legends, and may or may not have actually taken place, in which a number of wine experts couldn't reliably tell reds and whites apart.

I actually replicated this experiment once, with a bunch of friends. I had each guest bring a room-temperature bottle, and I devised a magnificent Excel spreadsheet that randomly generated a number corresponding to a wine for each taste that people took, so there would be no bias. Then I marked the results in the spreadsheet. My subsequent data analysis actually showed that on the whole, my (clearly sophisticated) friends COULD tell the reds and whites apart, but that wasn't universally true. I recall one of my guests being randomly assigned the same hard-to-identify red for three of his ten tastes, and he was devastated to get it wrong every time. I wonder if he has ever recovered from that experience. For the rest of us, the evening was good fun, as evenings featuring twenty or so bottles of wine often are.

Half a cup of wine for the sauce, half a glass of wine for the chef

Anyway, the other way in which I deviated from the recipe was by making it through Step 3 a few days in advance, then freezing the mushroom/walnut mix. On the day that I made the rest of the recipe for dinner, I popped the container out of the freezer in the morning. It was still half-frozen when I threw it in the pot, so I just had to allow a few minutes for it to thaw, halfway through Step 4, before continuing, which was no problem.