stupid but quick question

[kaigou]

vegetarian = no eggs = no bread ... correct?

is this generally a hard-and-fast rule, enough to consider it a pretty safe assumption?


ETA: apparently the unclear part above is my expectation that bread contains eggs. Yes, as a matter of fact, bread can contain eggs -- pretty much my entire repertoire of bread-recipes all contain at least one egg. (Some of them contain two eggs, even, and some even have milk.) This is not to say I've never made bread without eggs -- I have -- but I don't much care for the texture or the reluctant timbre of the bread when working with it. With eggs, the bread is considerably silkier/smoother, and just more pleasant and easy to work with; thus it's not a headache to let it rise six times and really become amazingly-melty. Or shorter version: bread can contain eggs.

ETA the 2nd: I suppose it might've been less confusing if I'd asked about, say, angel food cake... for which my grandmother's recipe uses the whites of like a dozen eggs. I rarely make it, though, because I hate wasting a dozen egg yolks, but I'm never quite sure what to do with them...

Comments

[leorising]

While I lived in the ashram, we were Hindu-style vegetarians. We ate milk products, but no eggs and no yeast or mushrooms (fungus are considered "semi-living", borderline sentient, IIRC.) You'll notice Indian breads like naan and chapati are not raised breads. And of course, we never ate fish or other meat.

I heard one lacto-vegetarian put it this way: nothing with a face (or potential for a face.) That was how she ate -- it's a pretty individual thing, if it's not culturally or religiously prescribed.

Here's a way around the whole controversy: if you're wanting to make bread for someone who doesn't eat eggs (for whatever reason,) and your bread recipes include egg, why not use an egg substitute/replacer? They're easily found in pretty much any store's health food section, a box lasts forever, and it works pretty well. You can't use it to make scrambled eggs or something, but it works well in recipes.

[kaigou]

Maybe it has something to do with what was available? Bread made without eggs uses gluten to bind it together -- yeast with wheat, and whatnot. One egg in a recipe usually means the egg is there as a binder; two eggs and you get into the eggs being part of the leavening. Quick breads usually use egg, rather than yeast, as the main part of the rising action... that's my general recollection from childhood lessons. Baking soda is an alternate way to leaven, but then you have to keep a careful eye on the salt-content because that's needed to offset the leavening (keep it from going haywire).

So perhaps it had something to do with what was available, and how long one could take prior to cooking? Sourdough is a lengthy process, and requires either daily care or outside-contact -- that is, someone to give you a cup of starter!

My grandmother's biscuits were made with baking soda as leavening, until my mom introduce her mother-in-law to the notion of using yeast in biscuits. I seem to recall the alternate recipe from that grandmother was one that used eggs as leavening, and it's mostly a matter of taste. The use of egg makes the bread smoother, and knowing what I do know of how people frequently tried to fake "good" (store-bought or high-quality) bread by various means, and knowing that eggless bread usually has a coarser texture, I can see the egg-based versions as being bread you set on the table to impress people. It's fluffier, lighter, a little sweeter, and definitely does not look like farmer's bread.

Frankly, I'm not sure how you can make good biscuits without lard. Oh, I'm sure there are recipes out there, but taste-wise it really makes a difference. Then again, I almost never have lard or lard-like stuff in the house anymore, so I haven't made biscuits in years!

[raletha]

Here's an article on vegans eating oysters: Consider the Oyster, which is similar in some ways to your edible sponge test case. Seems reasonable, if these animals are insensate and sustainably produced, there's no real issue I'd have (aside from palate; I never liked oysters).

Of course, now I can't stop thinking about poor old Sponge Bob Squarepants and traumatized children being fed sponges! XD

Food politics is such a minefield these days. Personally, I try to keep things simple and sane for myself, but it's hard to achieve any kind of logical consistency trying to balance all the diverse issues -- ethics, environmentalism, health, sociability -- so it never really is simple. I try to cut myself some slack (I'm less strict (fully lacto-ovo vegetarian, and I don't bother asking if the sour cream has gelatin or the curry has fish sauce. I don't want to be that guy!) when eating out or eating what other people have cooked for me than I am with what I eat at home and cook for myself (wholefoods mostly-vegan and finicky about sources for honey, dairy, and eggs)).

I think I've come around to accepting there is no perfect solution. If someone is trying to find, simultaneously, The Perfect Diet which is the most healthy, most ethical, most environmentally sound, and doesn't turn social eating into a hazard zone, they are doomed to fail.

[kaigou]

When a recipe calls for one egg, then (sometimes) you can use an egg subsitute, because the egg's only in there for binding. If two eggs, then substitutes fail (at least IME), because the substitutes don't always have the same leavening ability as eggs. The crazy thing is that I've tried, many times, to make various unleavened breads similar to pita, or naan. (Though I guess sodabread is technically leavened, since the soda acts as a leavening, though I've seen recipes for it listed as "non-yeast" because technically it's not a yeast-bread, but it's certainly not a non-rising bread, at least in a chemistry sense.) But, if it doesn't have yeast or some kind of leavening, I fail. Utter fail. I'm like the uber-anti-yeast-failure. I can make scones (more soda action) but even those never quite come out right.

I think it may be due to being raised by various cooks/bakers who got it into me that bread must rise, be kneaded, rise, knead, rise, knead, and then you end up with something awesome. Bread that doesn't get kneaded to improve it leaves me a little confused, I guess.

The friend of my mother's who was vegetarian described her diet as "nothing with eyes or a mother". Which meant even unfertilized eggs were also out, since they might not have eyes but they did have a mother.

[quillori]

A high proportion of the vegetarians I know are Hindu, closely followed by various variations of Buddhist - it's so easy to take the term 'vegetarian' (which is actually pretty recent - I think only about 150 years, at least in popular usage), and use it to rope together all sorts of different traditions, which isn't entirely unreasonable, where they can all be at least roughly summarised as 'don't eat meat', but it does overlook that what counts as meat, what would count as meat except it's too locally ubiquitous to reasonably avoid, and what non-meat things also tend to be excluded vary widely. (If you worry about cruelty to or exploitation of animals, things like milk or honey may be out; a religious prohibition may allow meat that hasn't been explicitly killed for consumption but disallow, say, onions ... and now I'm thinking about 'too ubiquitous/necessary to the local diet to avoid', I'm also thinking of 'too tasty to do without' and I want to go and look up all the medieval barnacle geese etc, which are such fun, but also not what I should be doing with my time right now). I've found it a not infrequent problem when people are travelling - they don't realise that what is on offer as vegetarian may be quite different to what they would mean by the term.

[raletha]

Right. Mostly I have issues with industrialized corporatized agriculture, not the individual foods. Meat is still off limits for me personally, but I am generally okay with arguments for ethical omnivores.

Honey bees are a little different as an issue because of the way they are used for pollination of crops, it's also about food security. Short version is this: over exploitation of honey bees -> honey bees die en masse -> crops don't get pollinated. This, to me, is actually an argument not to eschew honey, but to actively support small scale, local, organic apiarists.

Oh, food politics, why so hairy?

[hokuton_punch]

Well, I suppose you've got plenty of responses to go on with, but personally I still eat eggs, so eggs in bread would be fine with me. I also still eat fish, though - not very often at the moment because I don't really care for fish & chips that much and don't know a lot of good fish recipes so don't bother buying it, but next time I visit home I am going to eat ALL THE SUSHI. I'd like to phase out seafood entirely at some point, but I still don't like enough vegetables to live without it (yes, I am actually very bad at being vegetarian).

[nagasvoice]

Quick breads like cornbread, banana bread, muffins might perhaps meet the bready need?
My mom makes biscuits all the time using vegetable shortening, and they come out divine to my palate--very light, very flaky, an essence of breadness, but this does not match what everybody else expects. For instance, they do not reek of soda, or of bacon, or of salty stuff (such as would accompany redeye gravy and eggs for breakfast) or anything else that I have heard people expect from their "traditional" versions. They're very good, though. Recipe's on the baking powder can, I think.
When vegans talk about disliking the exploitation of milk cows or chickens, some of them are talking about avoiding factory farming risks and avoiding the whole system which breeds cows who give so much milk that it scours all the calcium out of their bones in spite of supplements. That is cruel and it ends their lives prematurely--totally aside from getting sent to slaughter when their productivity drops too low. And that's part of the argument why eating milk or cheese is just as ethically wrong as eating meat.
In addition, it's a tricky point whether calves "need" the milk as long as the cows are continuing to give it. Breastfeeding is subject to a lot of reasons why it might stop or reduce regardless of what the baby needs. We work very hard to breed and support cows we can milk much longer and in higher volumes than in the old days, while the calves can survive getting weaned younger. Vegans would argue that we artificially wean calves much sooner than is normal to "wild" cows.
I'm not sure we have enough wild cows left with which to get any research on this point, either; I know there's some in places like the scrubby woods in Spain.
Then there's the argument that supporting those cows costs tremendous amounts of ag resources and risky chemicals, to control pests in the fodder that keeps those high-powered animals productive. Plus, the wastes from things like the huge hog farms and chicken ranches are a major problem.
I still like bacon sometimes, darn it. No, I'm not vegetarian or vegan. I'm not terribly tolerant of legumes, or I might live on those more, just because it's cheaper, let alone for environmental reasons. But for practical economic reasons, a lot of us are eating a lot less meat than we used to. This may not be a bad thing, taken all together.

[annotated_em]

Egg yolks = lemon curd! Or other custards, but my mind turns first to lemon curd.

[kaigou]

Y'know, that would never have occurred to me in a hundred years. Probably because I've never actually made custard, but hey! Maybe this can be used as justification for pulling out Nana's divine and thoroughly sinful angel-food cake recipe.

(Better than pulling out her six-layer chocolate cake recipe, and if you want sinful, six layers of chocolate cake -- stacked so high it was held together with toothpicks to keep the layers from sliding off! -- then, well, there just ain't more sinful than that chocolate cake. But the angel food cake comes pretty close, probably neck and neck with the real pound cake recipe -- a pound, a pound, a pound, my god, someone just shoot my arteries now and get it over with.)

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds about right to me.

In my family the basic yeast bread (without eggs) is something you make when the cost of storebought bread is high enough that it's more economical to make your own. It's ordinary boring bread for family use.

Holiday breads (or sweet breads) are almost always made with eggs and generally milk as well.

Kat

[kaigou]

In my experience, if you're using baking soda as a leavening and the bread has any taste of soda once cooked... it means you didn't let the soda do its full work. It should exhaust itself, in a sense, by the time baking is done (ergo, bread is fully risen). The soda flavor to me says that someone rushed the chemistry, or they didn't put in enough salt to offset/tamp the soda. I mean, I know it's a taste, but still. I have three family recipes for biscuits -- one with yeast, one using eggs to leaven, and another using baking soda. The last one tastes similar to the first and second, but it doesn't tend to layer-flake quite like the first, and is more like the second in terms of being a little cakey. But since I don't usually keep a gallon of crisco in the house these days, I rarely make biscuits.

There are various reasons for any diet -- political, personal, due to allergies or sensitivities, and sometimes it's just the taste. I don't mind red meat, but I was raised on chicken, fish, and sometimes pig, more than anything else... with a whole lot of vegetables. Usually far more vegetable than meat at the table, really, which was a way to make the table look full without having too much expensive meat.

[quillori]

Destroying all my foodie credentials, I must admit I've always found oysters much more palatable when fried. (Although still not as nice as practically anything else one could fry instead. I feel much the same way about snails - they're perfectly unobjectionable as a means of conveying garlic butter from plate to mouth, but on the other hand, if that is the aim, some other thing, perhaps a hunk of bread, or even just a small spoon, would surely be superior.) That aside, it seems a perfectly acceptable argument.

Your approach seems very wise - even just on grounds of health, I think it would be impossible to balance everything. After all, our bodies are complex, and foods that are good for us in some respects may be bad for us in others. Even just a Perfect Healthy Diet would have to made from a huge number of carefully balanced trade offs. Trying to include ethical views on what should be eaten, and environmental concerns (which may also involve trade offs between things bad in different ways) ... yeah, perfection isn't happening there. And I've spent much of my life wandering hither and yon about the globe, so I've also spent much of my life as a guest, sometimes literally and almost always at least in the sense of being a guest in other people's country and other people's culture - walking in and objecting loudly to the ways of ones hosts has its own problems.

[kaigou]

walking in and objecting loudly to the ways of ones hosts has its own problems

This is one reason why I'm an omnivore. My upbringing says you never decline what a host offers short of absolute religious grounds (which, being raised Episcopalian, we didn't have) or deathly allergies. Even then, you don't turn it down so much as only accept a little and then push it around on your plate so it's not obvious.

Or as my mother put it once, there is no insult greater than to refuse to eat what someone else has taken the time and energy to make for you. Absolute no insult greater, as a guest.

This is also how I've ended up choking down foods whose texture doesn't appeal to me, like tripe or liver, but I'd rather choke it down and feel a little ill than feel the worse crime of having offended my host. The first only lasts as long as it takes to clear the palate, but the second is unforgivable.

...which must be balanced out, of course, with the knowledge that it's equally unforgivable, as a host, to force one's guests to violate allergen/health or religious issues just to satisfy their role as guest. So I try to curtail any offered food to what the guest prefers, and I smile and accept whatever I'm given when it's my turn as guest.

[kaigou]

And then there's actual sweetbreads and those... *shudder* It's like a name meant to fake you out. Sounds great, and then you ask what sweetbreads really are -- and if you're about eight when you get the answer, it's an immediate "ewwww!" kind of sense. Well, was for me. I still ate them (because pain-of-death was the alternative) but it was a lot harder to remain ignorant.

Which ironically was why I first avoided many of my Nana's recipes, because she labeled the type of milk as either "sour milk" (buttermilk) or "sweet milk" (regular whole milk). But that association of "sweet" being used to lie to you about what it was had me kinda wary... until my mom finally figured out and explained it to me. A'course, after that, I refused to drink buttermilk, having thus discovered that it was really another fake name for something sour. Heh.

[kaigou]

Fish and chips... isn't that mostly bread and lard, anyway, with a little bit of fish in there? Oh, and the newspaper. I'm not sure it counts as fish-and-chips if it doesn't come wrapped in yesterday's newspaper. At least, the fish-and-chips I had overseas seemed to require newspaper wrapping. (I was convinced as a result that somehow newspaper + fish was a mandatory combination, since I didn't grow up with fried/breaded fish, not counting pan-fried.)

Yes. Going pure vegetarian would mean giving up sushi and that makes baby kaigous cry. Very hard.

[okaasan59]

This is totally not helpful, but I subscribe to the Southern Louisiana Creed of Food Consumption: Eat everything that doesn't eat you first. And so I've eaten some pretty interesting things. ^_^

[nagasvoice]

I've migrated quite a long way from the roast or steak and potatoes with sides that we lived on when I was a kid. To be fair, knowledge of Chinese-style and Thai-style and Indian-style cooking is a lot more prevalent now than it was back in those days before "Small Planet" came out.
My bunch have been heading toward using more veggies and faster cooking, feeling full while less expensive. Probably a lot healthier, too.

[kaigou]

I think you and my mom attended the same school of food consumption.

[hokuton_punch]

Hah, you ask as if I've eaten it more than once or twice over here. XD (I - pretty much eat out exclusively at Thai restaurants because unf the Thai here is delicious. And I go to York's one Japanese restaurant sometimes, but it's more expensive and has a terribly small sushi selection, so I've just been doing without.) But I do recall it being much more breading than fish.

It makes baby Hokutos cry too. Oh, what would I do without mackerel sashimi...

[quillori]

Oh yes, this, exactly. I, too, was brought up to think that's how the host/guest thing works - if I'm the host I will put as much time and effort as I reasonably can into to discovering and accommodating my guests' preferences, but as a guest, you accept your host did their best and try to give the most convincing impression of pleased gratitude you can consistent with not actually being hospitalized or breaching a serious religious rule. As a guest, I think it's stood me well over the years - certainly I know people who have succeeded in getting themselves very poor reputations (which I don't think they realise) by managing to inadvertently insult a string of people precisely by refusing food; as a host it may have been less successful - on the one hand, I think I've mostly done a decent job of anticipating and catering to my guests, on the other, I've spent a fair amount of time being quietly and useless angry at people who fail to follow the guest half of the rules. (I mean, for example, would you, had your host gone to some trouble and expense to procure your favourite fruit, not normally obtainable where you were, and made it into your favourite dessert - would you really choose the moment it was placed in front of you to explain you'd given up eating desserts for the rest of the year and wouldn't be touching it? Well, obviously you wouldn't dream of it, but sadly others would. I've never quite been able to decide whether that sort of behaviour really is just bad manners, or whether in some places it's normal and acceptable behaviour.)

[opheliastornoway]

Egg yolk recipes - someone above mentioned lemon curd, and I would add to that any sort of creme brulee/catalan variation: we usually make them in tandem with pavlova, which takes lots of egg whites. Or, for less desserty things, there's a spinach cannelloni (sp?) recipe I do which technically calls just for the yolks, even if I'm usually lazy and use the whole egg ...

[dragonhand]

"What do you mean he don't eat no meat? ...it's alright. I'll make lamb!" /My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Mmmm, egg bread. Mmmm, lemon curd. Uh, what was the question?

Oh, also, I use egg yolks for egg tempura painting. Add a little water and pigment, and those watercolors are as stable and long lasting as oils. And won't crack. But I guess you don't have much use for that. XD

[dragonhand]

I guess that eyeball fungus from Labyrinth is out, then.

[kaigou]

I'm sure if you could make a dish out of it, it'd be great for making when the really annoying relatives come to visit -- the ones you don't want hanging out for two hours afterwards. Okay, in this case maybe it'd be because they're being carted off to the hospital, but who cares! It gets 'em out of your living room.

(This is the same basis for my mom's theory of Guest Chairs -- the ones you bring out when 'a lot of people will be coming over' -- that are horrendously uncomfortable. BRING OUT THE GUEST CHAIRS, she says, and if you watch who she offers them to, you know who she wants to be leaving as SOON as POSSIBLE. Bwahaha. It's like sekkrit family code!)