- Mm, that's so delicious.
(bright upbeat music)
Welcome back to the channel where we take something
and turn it into something else.
Today I'm gonna show you how to make lobster
out of hearts of palm.
Hey guys, I'm Candice the Edgy Veg
welcome back to my channel.
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or vegetable or nut
and turn it into a delicious cheesy or meaty counterpart,
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or trend online that you want me to try,
or if there is someone else's recipe
that you want me to test out for you.
So, like I said today,
I'm gonna show you how to use hearts of palm
and turn it into lobster.
So the reason why I chose hearts of palm
is because it doesn't really taste like anything
but it does have that kind of like,
it has the same mouthfeel that lobster has
when you bite into it and you can very easily marinate it
to taste like whatever you want.
So today I am going to show you
how to make a very fishy type of marinade,
and then I'm going to show you how to take that lobster
and turn it into a lobster roll.
I have used this marinade to make fish tacos,
all I do, is add a little bit of seaweed to it,
I've chosen not to include that today
cause a lot of people don't have access to seaweed
so I thought I would try to get ingredients
that most people have access to.
You can find hearts of palm in most grocery stores,
they're usually in the more international section,
I have found or where canned vegetables are,
but, most definitely
you will find it in an international section.
So for the buns for a lobster roll,
you want again, New England-style hot dog bun,
one that slices from the top or a roll.
You can even use like a po' boy type bun or a roll.
These are kinda like a vegan equivalent to a brioche bun
and they slice in the middle,
which is great, which is what we need.
The first thing I'm going to do, is make the marinade.
All right, so I have sliced up my hearts of palm
I kind of, when I wrote this for the blog,
I kinda said, how they kind of look like lobster meat,
so what that means for me is,
it has like a little bit of a curvature here.
I mean, something like this
kind of reminds me more of calamari
but it's all going to get broken down into the pan anyway
when we cook it,
so you don't have to be too delicate with it,
or you don't have to really worry about it.
I like to do a little bit thicker ones as well.
So there's a variety of sizes
but that is what hearts of palm looks like
if you haven't found it.
(clatter) Oops.
Try to source ethically or sustainably sourced
hearts of palm, because as we all know
for hearts of palm or palm seed oil,
palm oil not palm seed oil, (beep).
Palm oil, a lot of the time
can be very destructive to the rainforest
and it's not very ethical vegan wise,
because the orangutans.
And what I'm going to do for this marinade
is use lemon juice, oil, Old Bay Seasoning,
which is using a lot of fishy dishes and some garlic.
So I'm just adding everything together into the bowl,
I'm going to whisk that together
and then toss the hearts of palm with it.
(clinging)
So I'm using about two cans, two 14 ounce cans,
or a one 28 ounce can
that should serve about like four people,
I'm guessing, not assuming.
Adding the hearts of palm in there,
as you can see some of the pieces
have already kind of fallen apart.
Some pieces are a little bit thicker.
You're kind of getting, you want the illusion
of kind of like a lobster look
and then very gently
because they do fall apart quite easily.
You just want to kind of fold the marinade
into the hearts of palm or you can dump the marinade
over top of the hearts of palm the other way.
Instead of putting it into the bowl with the hearts of palm,
you can do it the other way around.
So fun fact, I actually wrote this recipe
like years and years and years ago,
it was supposed to be my cookbook.
We ended up having too many recipes
and I didn't end up using it
and I actually completely forgot about it
until I went back into my notes
when we were moving and I found it.
I was like, hey, we should totally do this recipe.
You wanna let this marinate as long as possible.
So if you know that you want to make this,
you know, tomorrow, marinate it the night before.
You know, 30 minutes is usually,
15 to 30 is usually pretty good for a marinade
on the, you know, minimum amount of time.
The longer, the better, obviously
because the longer you let it sit in this marinade,
the more that flavors are going to really
like meld and marry into the hearts of palms.
So we wanna set this aside
and then start our kind of mayo dressing
for the, I keep wanting to say lobster po' boy,
the lobster roll.
Aren't they kind of the same thing?
Is one Southern and one, not..
Where's New England?
There's a bay or a harbor there, right?
Okay, great, I'm Canadian, (laughs)
(beep) All right, for our mayo, for our sandwich,
I'm just using, just vegan mayo.
You can use whatever brand is your favorite.
We are going to add some lemon juice to that
for our veggies, we are going to use celery
and also red onion,
I like the flavor of red onion a lot more for this.
And then for herbs or herbs, you can either use chive
if you have fresh chive or dry dill or fresh dill,
I prefer chive.
So I'm going to use that today
cause I happen to have a fresh chive.
I'm starting with the more liquid ingredients first.
I'm gonna start with the mayo and then the lemon juice.
This is about a quarter, no half a cup.
We're going to add some lemon juice.
What I love about this recipe specifically,
is that it is very fresh tasting because of the flavors
and I've actually never had a lobster roll
but my partner at the time
helped me come up with this recipe
cause, you know, I did a bunch of research
about what's in a lobster roll, what lobster tastes like
he helped me, you know, create the recipe
just based on his palette
because he loved lobster and ate a lot of it growing up
and I mean, he wasn't vegan,
so that was something that he was eating,
but I, because of religious reasons,
grew up not eating any sort of seafood.
So that's a fun fact about me,
I've never had, ever had seafood.
I was allowed to eat a little bit of fish here and there
but I had a really bad experience
with opening a pack of fish fingers
or fish sticks when I was a kid
and one of the breaded ones,
there was like skin on it and it ruined it for life for me.
So I never did that again.
And I refused to eat it.
So not skin, scales.
Yes, it had a little bit of like the scale on it
and I said, I wasn't eating it.
And I never had fish.
Now I'm going to add the celery.
So I just kind of post this in the food processor.
You can chop it all by hand, but I don't want to, (laugh).
And then add some red onion,
I also like to save a little bit for garnish
and you can just kind of mix that together.
I like the crunch and the freshness that this adds.
We are going to add some chives.
You use dill or chives,
I'm gonna save it a little bit
for garnishing the sandwiches
and mix that all together.
And again, you can do this ahead of time.
All the flavors will mix together really nicely,
so you get this kind of like a mayo-wee salad, (laughs).
Let's call it that.
You put it in the fridge to firm up a little bit
and then yeah, when you are ready
to throw your sandwich together, it'll be ready.
After you've marinated the lobster,
lobster hearts of palm, I'm going to cook it a little bit.
I just like the texture change
that it gives the hearts of palm.
So I'm heating up just any old pan,
preferably non-stick,
if you have some sort of like non-stick ceramic,
whatever your non-stick pan is,
you wanna heat that up because you do not want these guys
to stick to the bottom and then you ruin
kind of the look of it.
So I am heating up my pan over medium high heat.
I'm also melting some butter.
Okay, so I'm just adding the hearts of palm to the pan
and you want to add it with all of the marinade
and you don't need to grease your pan or anything
because there is oil in the marinade
so you can cut back on oil that way.
You wanna kind of saute it for about five to eight minutes.
It's going to change the texture of the hearts of palm
just enough for it to kind of have that
kinda lobstery rubberiness,
no rubberiness is the wrong word.
Like that softness and kind of like buttery texture.
And plus we're adding tons of vegan butter to this
because everyone I've talked to is like,
yeah, you eat lobster because you can just dip it butter.
True or not true?
Do you eat lobster for the butter?
(laughs)
Yeah.
All right, so now I have my buns here.
I've kind of opened them up a little bit.
I have my dressing and I have my cooked lobster.
So ideally, you want to let this come to room temperature
and then throw it in the fridge
or just let it come to room temperature
because we are going to toss it with our dressing here
to make kind of like a lobster salad.
And then we're gonna toss it into our buns
and drizzle it with butter.
So this is what you'll end up with.
See how it kind of looks like
it's kind of flaking apart like this?
Very much looks to me, like lobster.
You're missing a bit of that red
but we're going to add that in with the paprika
that we're going to add at the end.
I mean, it's pretty close.
Nothing's going to be exact, we're not trying to do that.
I'm just trying to give you a vegan alternative
to foods that you love eating
but because you're vegan and you can't anymore
because you're choosing a more compassionate lifestyle.
So ideally, you want this to be room temperature
but we're trying to make a show here
so I'm not gonna wait for it.
And then you add in your,
I'm gonna start with this much of the dressing
and what you're going to get is a like lobster salad.
See how that's kind of starting to look
like what's in a lobster roll?
And then you get, you know, the nice saltiness
and that nice spice from the Old Bay Seasoning.
But then you get like that fresh, like the fresh texture
and a little bit of crunch from the onion and the celery
would add some freshness to it
just like balance texture-wise for me, I think anyway.
Now we put it all together, so we have melted butter.
So what I like to do,
is just take a little bit of this melted butter,
brush it on the bun.
You can also toast the buns a little bit
I actually prefer them to be softer.
You can also steam them.
Steaming them is really great as well.
This is completely optional, but I like to add, you know,
just a little bit of health to it.
So I add a little bit of greens.
I also find that it just really livens up the dish.
You get, you know, additional crunch for texture
and fresh greens always make everything
look really beautiful.
So that's helpful that way too.
And you're just stuffing that guy
who is very similar to a po'boy actually.
I like to add a little drizzle of butter.
That was a little bit more than a drizzle
but you get the idea and then a little sprinkle of paprika
and there you have a lobster roll.
All right guys, there you have it
a delicious vegan lobster roll
made out of hearts of palm.
I am so excited for you guys to try this.
It's so, so good.
It's also really nice
if you can save this like lobster salad part
and like throw it over any other salad that you're making
or, you know, the same way that you would maybe like
a big scoop of like tuna salad or egg salad.
I hope that you guys make this
and then, you know, send me all the photos on Instagram.
Mm, this is so delicious.
The textures and flavors just go so well together
but it's like very fresh
but then also very creamy and of course buttery
and you can put as much butter on there as you want,
vegan butter, of course.
All right, guys, if you love these types of buzzfeeds
where I show you how to take something
and turn it into something else and you have a request,
leave it in the comment section down below.
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give this video big, huge thumbs up.
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Okay, bye.
(hums)