Why I Stopped Trying to Make Vegan Food Look Like Meat

In the early weeks of cooking vegan meals for my partner, I was fixated on substitution. I wanted every dish to have a recognisable shape in the centre of the plate. Sausages, but vegan. Burgers, but vegan. Meatballs, but vegan. I spent a small fortune on products designed to mimic the appearance and texture of meat, cooked them with varying degrees of success, and presented them with the quiet desperation of someone hoping not to be found out. The results were fine. Sometimes good. But something felt off about the whole project.

The shift happened when I stopped trying to cook vegan versions of meat dishes and started cooking dishes that had never had meat in them to begin with. Dal. Shakshuka. Roasted vegetable traybakes. Grain bowls built around legumes rather than around the space where a chicken breast used to be. These weren't compromises — they were complete dishes with their own logic. Nothing was pretending to be something else, and that made all the difference.

The fake-meat mindset, however understandable, sets you up for disappointment. You're always comparing what's on your plate to a memory of what meat tastes like, and it usually falls short in at least one dimension. But when you cook a proper mushroom bourguignon or a chickpea curry or a lentil shepherd's pie that leans into what lentils actually are, there's nothing to compare it to. The dish is just the dish. You either like it or you don't — and I usually do.

This isn't an argument against vegan meat products — some of them are genuinely excellent. But as a foundation for learning to cook plant-based food, they're a trap. They teach you to rely on a product rather than to build flavour yourself. Once I started spending that same money on good dried legumes, miso, tahini, and a wider variety of spices, my cooking improved dramatically and my grocery bill went down.

A year on from that first nervous vegan dinner, I barely think about substitution anymore. The question I ask when planning a meal isn't 'what can I use instead of meat?' It's 'what do I want to eat?' The answer, more often than I would have predicted, is something that happens to be entirely plant-based — not because I'm trying to be virtuous, but because it's what sounds good. That shift in how I think about food has been the most unexpected outcome of the whole experience.