Vegetarian pizza, vegan kebabs and other Asian recipes with a meat-free twist – why this sauce-maker encourages freestyle cooking in the kitchen
- The recipes in Simran Savlani’s A Spark of Madness – an Amalgamation of 116 Vegetarian and Vegan Asian Staples have influences from all over the region
- Enjoy learning how to make a savoury bread and butter pudding, vindaloo mac and cheese, Halal Guys ‘chicken’, Thai pesto pizza, mapo tofu casserole and more
I was a bit worried that Simran Savlani’s book A Spark of Madness – an Amalgamation of 116 Vegetarian and Vegan Asian Staples (2021) would be just a way for the Hong Kong-based restaurant consultant to promote her line of Spark sauces, which she sells online (asparkofmadness.co).
You know the type, where every recipe uses at least one specialised product made by the writer, who offers no alternatives so you can’t actually cook from the book without buying something else that they profit from.
I needn’t have worried. Yes, some of the recipes do use crispy chilli oil or caramelised spring onion sauce – both produced by Spark – but you don’t have to buy them, because Savlani gives recipes for each sauce in the book.
Savlani, who studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, encourages the reader to use the book as a guide, because, she admits, she doesn’t follow recipes either.
“Firstly, I have a confession to make … full disclosure – I have never followed a recipe line for line,” she writes in the introduction. “I choose to freestyle in the kitchen with both disasters and successes, and this book is a consolidated compilation of the winners. I am still on my journey of learning more about food and cooking, but I know when a dish hits the right flavours […]
“For those who wander from recipes when cooking, I don’t expect you to follow mine. My advice is […] use the recipe as a guide but have fun and freestyle. Don’t abandon your own senses, so taste the dish whilst it is cooking; flavour and season along the way and make it your own!”
The vegetarian and vegan recipes have influences from all the regions of Asia, including China, the Mekong Delta, East Asia and India. Many of them sound enticing, and they include savoury bread and butter pudding, Bombay-style cheese lumpia (spring rolls commonly found in Indonesia and the Philippines), curry laksa with shiitake mushrooms and jackfruit, gunpowder twice-cooked potatoes, kalonji pakodas (Nigella seed fritters) with avocado chutney and chai, and vindaloo mac and cheese.
Also featured are recipes like ghee roast paneer sabich (an Israeli sandwich) with cumin hummus, pickled cucumber and red cabbage, Halal Guys “chicken” and tahdig (the chicken is made from mock meat or extra firm tofu) or scorched rice, stuffed parathas, galouti kebab (made with mushrooms and paneer, in place of the lamb), Thai pesto pizza, steamed tofu with blistered edamame, ginger and seaweed, rose harissa shakshuka, and mapo tofu casserole with burnt garlic fried rice.
