Vegan Fish Cakes
I don’t know why I bought them.
They were in the frozen section of a health food store and I must have been hungry and curious and perhaps had my taste memory misplaced. I bought them and they had been sitting in my freezer for awhile when after eating everything else, I felt… maybe today’s the day I reluctantly try them.
I’d been sick for awhile and didn’t have much of an appetite and figured, “Why waste weak tastebuds on food that I crave.” So, I let them defrost but lost the will to cook them. Finally, the next day, still feeling miserable, I fried them up.
One thought that may have led me to purchase them in the first place was that of crispy, crunchy fried cakes. This is something a lot of breading that was deepfried would result in. Visually, this did not look the case. Instead, they looked like something I would make on a budget with eggs, a can of tuna, and some flour.
So I ate them. I had some left over pickled ginger and wasabi from sushi, so put that on them. That helped make them tolerable. The result was that yes, these vegan fish cakes tasted like tuna. However, they tasted like canned tuna and well, that’s not great. In fact, they may have been better than canned tuna because they didn’t have any fishy smell. The texture of canned tuna but not the taste is an even fishier combination.
We’re entering the era of realistic plant-based and soon lab-based animal alternatives. We’re going to need to understand that if we make a fascimile of something untasty, the result is also untasty.
