At Your Table has a large brigade of hand-picked professional chefs from around Australia, spanning from Sydney to Melbourne, Brisbane to Perth and everywhere in between.
We recently sat with a couple of our chefs to chat about Vegan dinner party options and from the chat we took a snippet of tips to help you throw a Vegan dinner party to remember.
The first three tips are more based around the fundamentals of writing a great vegan menu. The last tip is based on something funny one of our chefs said. Slightly off topic but he made a great point.
No Vegan dinner party is complete without an amazing Vegan dessert.
4 Things not to forget! Tips for a Vegan Dinner party
- Texture
- Sustenance
- Seasonality
- Dessert
Texture
Texture or lack thereof it when comes to Vegan food was a unanimous vote amongst our chefs. Every chef in the room said incorporating texture into a vegan dish is paramount as it can lack with some recipes.
Amongst the suggestions for incorporating texture into a menu some of the biggest hits were of course Nuts and seeds, beans and pulses.
Another was dehydrating vegetables to give a crispy element to a dish. Creating a variance in texture can really heighten the senses so this is a great one to remember next time you host a vegan dinner party.
Sustenance
Falling under a similar umbrella to texture is sustenance. Long story short you cannot simply take a hearty element out of a dish, serve a garnish and expect it to be memorable.
Instead we encourage our chefs to focus on a substantial element becoming the hero of a dish. This could mean rolling some roast vegetables in some Quinoa and seeded granola or opting for a carb to carry the weight with a mushroom and cashew tortellini dish.
Seasonality
Seasonality is of course important in all facets of writing a menu whether it’s for a Vegan dinner party or not.
However, a common point in the conversation with our personal chefs was that seasonality is even more important when the vegetables have nothing to hide behind in terms of flavour.
Seasonal fruit and veg can be the difference between a great vegan dish and a not so great vegan dish!
Dessert
So, during our brainstorm one of the chefs shouted dessert… To which we replied of course, but no dinner party is great without dessert.
What he meant was that vegan desserts often don’t get as much attention as they should. Much like any vegan cooking if a dish is well planned, there really needs to be no reason why it isn’t just as delicious as a non-vegan dish.
His example was a Cacao, Avocado and brazil nut mousse… Once you try it you will be an advocate for all thing’s vegan dinner party, we promise you!
Have you recently thrown a vegan dinner party?
If so we would love to hear about it in the comments below,