If you wanted to make shelf stable snacks that didn’t cost a lot but delivered on umami what would you make?
My first thought was corn nuts or baked chickpeas. A low cost main ingredient and a minimal amount of home grown herbs and MSG as a seasoning would do the job.
What else can you come up with other than beef jerky?
Picture for the algorithm.
Kinda not answering the question, but as a lazy disabled vegan if I want a big umami moment I will drink a cup of vegetable broth with MSG and maybe a splash of soy milk. Delivers a truckload of umami flavor, quick, easy, tasty
You might kind of be on to something there. I don’t have a lot of vegetable broth. I don’t tend to make broth until I have enough bones. But I do have a crapload of turkey stock. I could easily add some MSG to that and thicken it with a little homemade oat milk. I don’t keep soy in the house but I always have oats. And while we do buy milk, I’m totally up for a substitution if it works. One of the benefits of oat milk is that oats are shelf stable and milk goes bad way too fast.
I get powdered vegetable stock/broth which works well for me. Oat milk wouldn’t do much to thicken it, if you want it to be a little thicker you could add a little cornflour.
I never enjoyed any homemade oat milk, it always seems weirdly slimy to me. I buy soy milk in ambient cartons and it stays good more or less indefinitely on the shelf. Obviously when I open a carton of it I keep that refrigerated and use it within a couple of weeks.
I’m 30 miles from the nearest place that offers things like powder broth. I don’t actually even know if they offer it.
Oat milk is slimy. When you heat or crush oats, it gelatinizes them which creates that slimy texture. It has its place but it’s not a universal replacement.
On the rare occasion, when I do make tofu, I will make soy milk and kefir. One of the nice things about soy is that you get three different products from making tofu. I’ll use the kefir to make something like almond cookies. I do really appreciate the functionality of soy. I just never do it.
Yeah, that’s fair. I just buy powdered broth online, along with most ambient ingredients/foods, it’s cheaper and more accessible for me.
Now you need to get into making miso, that also gives you homemade soy sauce. Idk what we did to deserve soy, must have been something good.
Are you able to order things online?
https://www.amazon.com/Knorr-Premium-Vegetable-Roasted-Versatile/dp/B0FGL7662R
baked tofu seasoned with sesame oil and soy sauce
Kale chips are real easy to make and hold whatever seasoning you want pretty well. I say kale because that’s the best one to search for if you’re looking online for recipes, but the recipes you’ll find work with pretty much any tougher leafy green. Imo mustard greens go particularly well with msg seasonings; when I make instant ramen, I usually make a slightly higher effort soup base, and the unused ramen seasoning packets almost always go to mustard green kale or chard chips. I’ve never tried to make them last longer than a week or so, but its a dehydrated salted food. I’m sure they’d last a good long while if you sealed them with some kind of preservative or dessicant or something
Popcorn kernels last a good while (old ones can be freshened up with a small amount of water the day before you pop them). Paired with nutritional yeast and sriracha powder it’s a flavour bomb. Also you can buy real cheese powder, it needn’t be the fake stuff.
We bought a mini popcorn machine just like the theatres and it had been brilliant. Highly suggest it if you have the room.
Put kernels, salt, oil in, turn on, fresh popcorn comes out 3 minutes later.
If you want to get fancy use pop’s kettle corn and it really does taste like real kettle corn.
Ah, I guess I’m rustic. I just do it in a big 7 litre stock pot with a mesh screen across the top. Steam escapes, and I can make enough for the whole family in one go. Takes about twice as long, but I don’t mind. I add a little turmeric powder to my oil to get that movie popcorn uneven dye effect.
I mean you can do that as well. Or a whirlie pop. Or a microwave bowl. Or bag over a fire.
I like mine because I don’t have to sit over a stove for 5 minutes and crank.
My machine makes 1 cup kernels which is 32 cups popped.
Flavacol is great. So are the Amish popcorn seasonings like ballpark.
When my wife moved in she made me watch every episode of Little House on the prairie. On DVD. During that, we started making a lot of popcorn. Because if you’re not eating popcorn while watching Little House on the prairie, you’re probably doing something wrong. It’s been 15 years and we still stock popcorn in the house.
We don’t keep nutritional yeast in the house.
Ducks need extra niacin when you’re raising them. Failure to do that will result in angel wing. Which is not a good thing. A lot of people will supplement their food with nutritional yeast. We don’t do that. We give them frozen peas instead.
Now I’m wondering what it would be like to add some frozen peas to the popcorn pot.
The only Sriracha in the house is homemade so I don’t have any powder. And my 10 tray dehydrator busted itself a year and a half ago. I don’t have the $100 to buy a new one. But if I did, I could totally dehydrate some Sriracha and then run it through a grinder to powder it. So you have some good ideas here.
Ah yeah no I wasn’t thinking of having you reduce your sriracha sauce - that’s a heavy lift just for popcorn that tastes like Takis. In Asian grocers in the UK (meaning India-centric), in the spice aisle they sell a ready made powder that mimics the sauce pretty well, and it sticks to hot popcorn. I had to look up the brand, I think it’s Greenfields.
I don’t think a dried pea would pop like corn does, but it would be tasty if it did.
When we did keto we made parmesan chips. You just grate parmesean cheese into little piles on a sheet pan and put it the oven. Pretty tasty, super easy.
super expensive
I can’t really afford parmesan. Found a really good deal a long time ago and I still have a little bit left but it’s fully crystallized after 10 years. It is an umami bomb. This year we made the decision to buy some green-can parmesan. Which you see in my recent posts.
But green can parmesan does not work to make chips, too much cellulose. But you can put either the good stuff or the cheap stuff on popcorn. So that’s a good idea.
Tomato mozzarella salad with lots of Aromat.
That doesn’t sound self-stable in the slightest. Do you have a different vision of this than I do?
Fair. Reading is hard in the morning.
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