How To Include Vegan Cold Cuts In Your Healthy Menu

An “embutido” is neither more nor less than minced meat and offal, sometimes also blood, such as blood sausage, seasoned with spices and aromatic herbs that is stuffed into pork tripe. However, now we have vegetable “tripe” and much healthier vegetable alternatives to include on your menu.

Today I am going to talk to you about them and I will propose a weekly menu, including Christmas Day, in which you will find some ideas to use these vegetable sausages in your recipes, as well as planning breakfasts, lunches and dinners for the week so that make it easy for you to organize and eat healthy and balanced.

• You can download this week’s healthy menu here.

How to substitute sausages for healthier vegetable alternatives

Vegetable sausages have been marketed for more than 20 years, and can be seen or classified as trompe l’oeil. Whether or not we can call them sausages is something that has been discussed in the European Parliament with the approval of the new CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) in November 2020. It has been a recurring theme in the media and, after the vote We know that, for at least a few more years, we will see labels talking about vegetable meat or vegan chorizo.

In Spain, quality vegan sausages were slow to arrive, but it is clear that they have come to stay.

Something that we must be very clear about the meat sausage is its origin : in most cases it was a reuse product. It is for this reason that part of the characteristic flavor of many of them is the mixture of spices, which often masked the taste of the less noble parts of the slaughters.

This is why, on many occasions, knowing the mix of spices used in the originals can help us make our homemade vegetable sausage.

Another option is to give the flavor that conventional sausage gave to dishes that, otherwise, can be made with vegetables, such as legume stews. Here is a spice that stands out above the rest in Spanish cuisine: paprika.

We are not talking here about cured or salted meats, which in addition to being another completely different product are much more difficult to reproduce in vegetables. In any case, nothing is impossible and we are already seeing how some brands are launching themselves into this aspect of the food industry in a vegetable version.

Not all sausages are the same

Something that we must take into account of many vegan products in this category is that, even if they are vegetable, we can find that they are ultra-processed and, therefore, of occasional consumption. Even if a product is labeled as suitable for vegan diets, this does not imply that it enters a healthy diet. It is quite common for many of these products to have poor nutritional quality and ingredients to avoid, at least on a regular basis.

As always, I encourage you not to get carried away by the packaging or the place where they are found, sometimes with diet products or in herbalists, and that you check the label. You may still find invert sugar or a large amount of poor quality starches. An informed purchase helps us to have a conscious diet. These are some interesting options that will help you to know:

• Calabizo, the pumpkin chorizo. In the case of pumpkin chorizo, we find an existing product that is easy to be veganized. The Galician company Calabizo has been marketing it successfully for years and now it has also launched into the traditional chickpea stew, but with its pumpkin chorizo. A healthy and eco-friendly alternative that actually drinks from the tradition and reuse of pumpkins. This type of chorizo ​​is ideal for homemade stews.
• Black pudding Avus. Another brand of vegetable products is Avus, which not only has “chorizo”, even a spicy variety, but also “sobrasada” and “blood sausage”. Its products are made in Murcia in an artisan way, based on marinated soybeans. Very well achieved and nutritionally interesting alternatives for those who want a snack like that of childhood.
• Polony Frys. Yes, we can make the mortadella at home, and it may not be the sausage you were expecting to find here. However, despite appearances, Frys has greatly improved the composition of this product, which has been on the market for many years. Of this type of products, depending on the flavoring and texture, we can find many brands and styles, and we should always try to check the label to see if they really interest us. This long-lived South African brand currently has two different product lines, one of them more focused on nutritional quality, but they are still for occasional consumption.
• Ham and salty meat. Regarding vegetable cured meats, for a few years we have had those of the Good & Green brand, which usually have ingredients such as wheat gluten or chickpea flour, using natural colors and flavorings. These are products that simulate smoked ham or salty meat from other countries, but they are products that would fit perfectly into a vegan delicatessen. Here we must monitor the amount of salt, the Achilles heel of most processed products of these characteristics.

Something that we can highlight is that, if vegan is not synonymous with healthy, natural is not always. Although some of these plant products may be perceived as ultra-processed, they still have a much lower carbon footprint than meat ones. And if we carefully monitor the labels and choose quality vegetable sausages, they are healthier than conventional ones, since processed meat, whether cured, salted, smoked or fermented, such as Serrano ham, is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the WHO for more than 5 years.

Downloadable weekly menu

In the menu that I propose to you this week, which ends with the Christmas celebrations, I wanted to give you some clues on how to include vegetable sausages in a healthy menu. It is accompanied by some developed recipes, including a recipe for homemade vegan chorizo ​​based on seitan. The cold stations with stews, stews and other hot preparations are undoubtedly ideal for consuming vegetable sausages, whether they are homemade or purchased. In this post by Virginia García you will find other ways to make homemade vegan chorizo, if you want to experiment.