- Looks suspicious.
- I definitely felt trolled by this recipe.
I feel like Gordon is sitting there being like,
you donuts, you actually made this recipe, you donkey.
- You surprise me for how shit you are.
- At this point,
we've all seen the Gordon Ramsay eggplant steak.
I have some feelings,
but I don't want to make them until I've tried the recipe.
So today on The Edgy Veg,
I'm going to try and test out this infamous steak
by Gordon Ramsay, using an eggplant.
(rousing classical music)
The instructions seem bizarre.
I'm not convinced on the eggplant can make the texture
or resemble the texture of a steak.
I mean, Gordon Ramsay has made fun of vegans
and vegetarians in the past, so I'm a little confused
as to why he thinks that he can cook vegan food.
There's a lot of ingredients.
It's very time consuming by the looks of things,
but you know what?
He's a professional,
so we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Hi, I'm Candice, The Edgy Veg.
And you know, if you want to be my friend,
you can hit the subscribe button if you want.
If not, that's cool. We could just go into the video.
All right, so this is the Vegan Steakhouse Dinner.
There's a lot of elements to this.
I'm not going to do all of them because it's a lot,
and I know what mashed potatoes tastes like.
But we are going to do the steak
with the wine glazed mushrooms.
Skeptical, really skeptical. Don't love eggplant.
I shouldn't go into this negatively,
but I'm not being negative, I'm being hopeful.
For the eggplant steaks themselves,
well, we have eggplant.
A ridiculous amount of spices.
Blown away by all of the ingredients for this steak.
And the timing.
I think it said something like an hour and a half,
which is active time, not inactive time, so.
Okay, well I've preheated the oven.
I have to prepare eggplant steaks.
Char eggplant over an open flame using your gas stove.
Crickets, cause I don't have one of those.
Alternatively, char in the oven.
That I do have. I do have an oven.
So, what I'm going to do
is I've turned it all the way up to broil.
I'm going to trim both sides of this guy
and I'm just going to put it in the oven
right up close to where the element is
and then just turn it until it's charged.
All right, so it's not really charring very much in my oven,
so I figured I'd help it along with my torch.
Probably shouldn't aim that right at your head, Eric.
This isn't in the instructions,
but when I blacken red pepper
and I want to take the skin off, I cover it.
And that should help.
While I'm waiting for the eggplant to cool down,
I'm going to start with the basting jus.
So I'm just going to add red wine, beet juice,
rosemary, bouillon, butter, tamari, worcestershire.
Okay, perfect, right into the pot.
Got our beet juice,
Molly freshly juiced that for us.
Red wine.
Rosemary.
Smells kind of bad, but that's fine.
I can't smell most things because of when I got COVID.
I still don't have my smell back and I can smell this,
so that's saying something.
It's not that I don't like the smell of hot wine.
It's not my favorite in the world,
but mix that with hot beats.
All right, bringing that to a rapid boil.
We'll be reducing it to half a cup.
So it's going to be rapidly simmering for a while.
Then we whisk in the bouillon and the vegan butter
and stir to incorporate.
Ooh, I think this is pretty much ready to go.
I would say that's reduced to a little more than half a cup.
I'm going to whisk in bouillon, vegan butter,
and they're remove from heat.
I have paste, but you can use cubes if you don't have paste.
And then adding in the soy sauce.
And this is vegan worcestershire.
If you don't have access to that,
I'm sure you could just leave it out
or use liquid smoke or something.
I will say right off the bat,
this recipe is going to take you all day.
Just because there's so many moving parts
and you can't necessarily do one
while waiting for the other, which I don't love.
It's actually one of the main reasons
why I don't write recipes like this.
It's just because it's not reasonable for the average person
to commit to this.
We have things to do.
So I'm just going to go in.
It's a little bit hot still,
but I'm just going in with my hands
and just pulling the skin off.
Some areas are quite dry, some aren't.
I feel like there definitely should be
some sort of disclaimer right away,
saying, if you don't have a gas stove
this is going to be difficult for you.
But we adapt.
I'm a little concerned about the texture of this eggplant.
One of the reasons why I don't love it
is because of its mushy texture.
So, I'm curious to see
how cooking it for this long in the oven
is going to change that.
I mean, steak has a very tender,
but kind of tough chewy texture
and I just don't think that's what's going to happen here,
but I could be wrong.
All right, so I have de-skinned my eggplant.
Now I'm going to season liberally
on all sides with steak rub.
I mean, this seasoning sounds really tasty itself.
I would totally use that on tofu or something
or a different eggplant recipe, maybe not this one.
I'm going to kind of press it in so it helps stick.
He doesn't say how much salt, but it says liberal, so.
Then I'm covering in olive oil and then wine.
Okay.
Roast in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes,
turning once carefully, okay.
So this is after 30 minutes.
Not looking great.
So, it says to season it.
I can't possibly imagine why,
since there's so much seasoning, but I'm not a professional.
I'm gonna grab the same steak spice
and season it again, I guess.
And then it says to put it back into the oven
for another 30 minutes.
It doesn't say to bast it or anything.
It just says to season it again, so I don't really know.
This is burning, right? Or did I misread that?
It just says season and roast.
The au jus part doesn't come in
until after 30 minutes again.
Gonna stick it back in.
♪ Why did the chicken cross the road ♪
♪ 'Cause you didn't fucking cook it ♪
Okay, so this is straight up burning.
I'm taking it out 15 minutes earlier than I was supposed to.
I turned down the oven to 300.
So I'm going to drizzle it now with a quarter cup of the jus
and then cook it for another 15 minutes, turning once.
Basing periodically with jus until tender,
slightly dehydrated, an eggplant begins to resemble a steak.
What?!
Those are the instructions. Just not gonna happen.
It's not gonna resemble a steak.
Hello, we're back, four hours later.
This is what we have.
Actually looked like not steak,
but definitely a cooked piece of meat.
But it also looks burnt.
But you know what?
I'm willing to play it up the way he suggests
and give it a try, so.
We've made some mashed potatoes here.
Good!
Love that for me.
I will eat this in my personal time.
All right, so doing a bed.
(grunts)
You know what?
It moves just kind of looks like meat. I'll give it that.
But this is really burnt.
It does disguise itself well.
It really shriveled down.
It got that leathery, almost leathery kind of exterior.
I'm just not convinced it's going to taste great.
I have some mushrooms.
I felt like it needed something green. It was just so dark.
Okay, well there she is.
(moans playfully)
Now I'm very, very curious.
Maybe I'll love parts of it.
Perhaps, maybe.
- During the cooking process,
it definitely looked more like a roast to me than a steak,
especially because the steak is usually pan fried.
In five minutes, it's like the fastest meal on the planet.
This was all day.
We've been here since 8:00 a.m. making this steak.
Yeah, I feel like it looked like a roast
and then it looked way overdone.
(calming classical music)
- As I expected.
Just a mushy eggplant.
Let's go with just the steak first.
Okay, so I thought it was be really gross
and it's not really gross.
But it's also nothing like the texture of a steak.
It is over the top way too salty.
But you know what?
I was expecting to really hate this and I don't hate it,
but it's not awful.
There's a lot of burnt sticks in it, which I don't enjoy.
It's Gordon Ramsay's steak.
Do you regret it?
He just leaves. He's like, no.
The flavor's not terrible,
especially since I was expecting it
to just taste like burnt.
But it just, it has so much rosemary in it and it's burnt,
the rosemary, and I just don't.
I don't like mushrooms like this either.
My favorite way to cook mushrooms,
super hot pan, mushrooms, fry 'em up, salt.
That's it, not like this.
I mean, it's fine.
I would not order this at a restaurant
nor would I make it again.
It's way too much work.
The texture is nothing like a steak.
The flavor is nothing like a steak.
(moans) Meh.
I like the combination of flavors,
even with some of the weirder ingredients,
like the beet juice.
I get it, the beet juice kind of gives that iron taste
that a steak has.
I really just think the eggplant was the wrong way to go.
Molly, do you want to try it?
- I now have a low expectation.
- And what do you think about the steak?
- Salty.
- So salty.
- Oh, it's really salty. I can't really taste much else.
- Louie just said it's terrible and that's it, and left.
- Eh.
I'd rather have something else.
To me, this steak, steak tasted so salty.
And for a lot of the carnivores who I know, they're like,
okay, vegan steak, it's not anywhere close.
And so I thought the Gordon Ramsay's steak
would be closer to that, it wasn't.
I feel like he may have written this recipe
so that you're like, oh, vegan steak is gross,
I'll just eat a regular steak.
I'm onto you, Gordon.
First of all, how many times has he made fun of vegans?
I'm a huge Gordon Ramsay fan, okay?
I watch "Kitchen Nightmares" every single season.
"Hell's Kitchen", all of them, okay? I love Gordon Ramsay.
Did not like this recipe.
I thought that Gordon Ramsay doing a vegan recipe
would be something unintentionally vegan.
Roasted vegetables, some pasta dish, anything.
And then if he was going to use eggplant,
it's like, there's so many things you can do
that happen to be vegan
that would have been 10 out of 10 Gordon style.
But this one, it was so many ingredients.
It was not easy to follow, especially for somebody at home.
I just, I don't think that was it.
- And I mean, this much work, it should at least taste okay.
Save yourself the time.
Save yourself the money.
Save yourself having to...
Just don't, it's not worth it.
Make my seitan instead. (laughs)
I'll actually leave the link to my seitan steak
and my mushroom steaks in the description box
so you can make something that tastes good that is not this.
This is the type of food that you give non-vegans
that make non-vegans think vegan food is gross.
Gordon Ramsay, I'm going to have to give you a thumbs down.
Maybe try better next...
Better luck next time. Try again.
Try some of my vegan steak recipes on my blog.
Maybe it'll inspire you to cook something
that doesn't taste like this, or look like this.
- Gordon Ramsay, I challenge you to make
one of our vegan recipes that are meant to be vegan
and enjoyed by vegans and carnivores alike.
Game on.
- If you guys have any recipes that you seen out there
that are a bit interesting
or are made or written by famous chefs
trying to make vegan food,
you can leave them in the comment section
and I'll try them out.
Other than that, hit the subscribe button
so we can be friends.
If not, that's cool too.
And I'll see you next time. Bye!