Look! It’s a pie! A dark chocolate silk pie with caramelized bananas on top! And guess what! It’s…VEGAN!
No, I am not vegan. I have a friend who is, though. She somewhat recently decided for health reasons that it would be better to abstain from animal products as much as possible. I guess you wouldn’t call her a true vegan because she will eat cheese or meat or some other kind of animal products now and then. Like I said, it’s for health reasons and not some weird, uppity moral stance that a lot of vegans seem to have. That being said, if you’re vegan for moral reasons, that’s totally fine. Just leave me and my non-vegan ways alone and we’ll get along.
Anyway, I saw this recipe awhile ago when I was channel surfing. I happened upon Bitchin’ Kitchen (which is an amusing show for all of about 10 min and then it’s annoying) and they were playing the vegan/vegetarian episode. This pie thing was one of the things that Nadia made. I thought it looked interesting and worth a try. And since I was going to a little gathering with said vegan friend, I thought this would be the perfect time to try out the recipe.
The recipe is listed on the Cooking Channel website but there are a lot of discrepancies from the recipe given on the show and what’s on the website. The recipe I’m listing below is from the show.
Materials:
- 0.25 cup plus 0.5 tsp cocoa butter , melted
- 1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
- 0.5 cup almonds, pulverized
- 0.25 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 0.125 tsp sea salt
- 1 cup dark chocolate, chopped
- 1 cup silken tofu
- 2 tbsp soy milk
- 1 tbsp maple syrup
- 2 bananas, sliced in to 0.25″ slices
- 1 cup raw sugar
Procedure:
- To make the curst: Preheat the oven to 300 deg F.
- Grease a 7″ tart mold with 0.5 tsp of cocoa butter.
- In a large bowl, mix together coconut, almonds, remaining cocoa butter, vanilla extract, and salt until crumbly.
- Mold the crust mixture into the pan, pushing up along the sides.
- Bake until the coconut is lightly browned, about 20-25 min.
- Remove from oven and let cool.
- To make the filling: Melt the chocolate over a double boiler.
- Cool for 10 min.
- Add tofu, soy milk, maple syrup to the chocolate and beat until smooth, about 10 min.
- Add the filling to the cooled pie crust.
- Chill for 2 hr.
- To make topping: Coat the banana slices with raw sugar.
- Broil the bananas on the top rack until the sugar is caramelized, about 5 min.
- Place the bananas on the pie, working from the center.
- Chill for another 30 min.
Notes:
- I had a really hard time finding cocoa butter. You don’t necessarily need “food grade” cocoa butter, but you do need 100% pure cocoa butter. Sometimes you can find it in the skin care aisle in drug stores and the like. In fact, I did call a few places and they said they had pure cocoa butter, but they didn’t. Definitely do not use cocoa butter lotion in your pie.
- Anyway, I substituted coconut oil for the cocoa butter and it was fine. You could probably use shortening, which wouldn’t taste as good; butter, which would taste great but make your recipe no longer suitable for vegans; or some vegetable oil that has a relatively high smoke point, around 200 deg C, which is approximately the smoke point of all the other substitutes I listed.
- I used a disposable 8″ pie pan. On the show, Nadia uses something she calls a “pie mold” but it looked like a tart pan. It’s really hard to find a 7″ tart pan. But with the recipe as listed, you have enough to make a decent crust in an 8″ pie pan. And you don’t have to wash a pan afterwards.
- I don’t think I used dark enough chocolate (I used dark chocolate morsels). Technically, it was dark chocolate with 53% cocoa solids, but I think I probably could have used something even darker and less sweet.
- A block of tofu is about 2 cups. It’s kind of annoying to have half a block of tofu afterwards. I guess you can just make two pies.
- If you are too lazy to pulverize your own almonds, just use almond meal. Then you can make macarons after.
- Be careful with the broiler and the bananas. I broiled on high and I have a tendency to burn things when I do that. I checked every few minutes to make sure I wasn’t burning anything. Also, it may be better to broil your bananas in two batches if your broiler tends to broil unevenly. Or finish up with a torch, I guess.
- Or better yet, just use a torch and skip the broiler all together. It would give you more even results and less soggy bananas because you could concentrate a lot of heat on the sugar to caramelize it before the banana slices get to hot.
- If you do use a torch, do yourself a favor and don’t get one of those ridiculous “crème brûlée torches.” They’re terrible and not worth the money. Just go to a hardware store and get a propane torch for the same price. It’s a lot more rugged, it won’t melt after your first use, and you get more fuel. You can even get a self-igniting one if you prefer one of those.
- Also, I only needed about 0.25 cup of sugar for the bananas.
- Also also, it was a delicious pie. If you are careful to beat away all the specks of tofu (it takes awhile), you would never know that there was tofu in it. The crust has a wonderful nuttiness to it, especially if you bake it closer to the 25 min of the range.
- If you really wanted to make the pie not vegan however, you could use cream cheese in place of the tofu and butter in place of the coconut oil. But I think the pie recipe is plenty good as it is and slightly healthier for you too.
Random moosages as I see fit. 