Maybe Obama Wouldn't Notice There's No Eggs or Cream?

I recently made my first sweet potato pie for a friend's birthday (and also as a subtle nod to Obama's reported declaration that it is his favorite pie).

But I distinctly remember reading somewhere that there's a difference between yams and sweet potatoes and so I was very much stressed out at the grocery store when all I could find were yams. (I even tried to call my mom...because I am a barbarian who does not have an Internet-ready cell phone).

Eventually I had to make an executive decision - it was pie with yams or no pie at all, so I opted for the former. The yams, however, were gigantic and so it took a lot of microwaving to soften them up...and even after the recommended 12 minutes, they were still not quite mushy...but I was impatient and so instead of mashing them by hand, I threw them in my Cuisinart. (I still think there were some lumps. But the birthday boy was nice.)

When I later attempted a vegan spin on the same recipe, however, I used much smaller yams and this made the pie-making process a lot simpler. They were so much easier to scoop out! And this time, post-Cuisinart, there was not a single lump. (But I ended up with so much puree that it felt like I should invest in Jerry Seinfeld's wife's book or launch my own line of baby food a la Diane Keaton in Baby Boom.)

I've long insisted that my Cuisinart is worth its weight in gold for cheesecakes alone. It makes everything so simple - crusts and filling! But, I will admit that when going vegan, there's so much stuff to blend that it was kind of a pain to have to clean it out over and over again.

Plus, between the blended silken tofu that replaced three large eggs and the silken tofu/soy milk/vanilla/sugar combo that I used instead of whipping cream, I was negotiating a lot of bowls...and I even ran out of regular spatulas, so I had to resurrect my Halloween spatula one last time before it was totally seasonally inappropriate to use it anymore.

A brief note on my whipping cream replacement: it was not an easy thing to find. Granted, I didn't do the most extensive research in the world (Hello, Google...), but all I really found was something on About.com - which is what I ultimately used...and I suppose it did the trick. But despite my new positive thinking mantra that "thoughts are things," I was dubious. It just seemed so - and here's that word again - beany.

(I later heard from the folks at the Post Punk Kitchen who recommended using chilled coconut milk with sugar and vanilla. But, alas, their advice came a little too late for this particular pie.)

A brief aside: I'm a pretty high-strung person and I worry incessantly. Baking is one of the few things that actually calms me down. Whenever I'm upset about anything, more times than not, I feel infinitely better after I have baked something. I'm told there's something about the exactness of the measuring that makes you focus on something else and so a lot of people find it therapeutic. (My aunt, for example, lost a baby years ago and wanted to do nothing but bake bread for weeks and weeks afterward.) But...I found myself being a little more loosey-goosey with the measurements here. I needed 16 ounces of silken tofu for my whipping cream replacement, but the boxes of tofu were 12 ounces each...and so I ended up just throwing in whatever was left over from the first blended batch of tofu after I'd scooped out my 3/4 of a cup to stand in for eggs. (Perhaps why it wasn't more therapeutic?)

When everything was mixed together, it was a frothy, almost mousse-like consistency that didn't want to pour. I actually had to scoop it into the crust in heaping spoonfuls. But when I licked the spatula, it tasted like regular sweet potato pie (albeit slightly muted).

It cracked in the oven - much like my cheesecakes always do because I refuse to go to the trouble of using a water bath - but, again, it was a pretty good looking pie in the end. And it went to a good home -- it will be spending Thanksgiving with my yoga-loving friend in Park Slope.

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Comments

[loyldem]

Tofu in a traditional soulfood dessert? Oh, I don't think so.

[katysax]

Don't worry about the yams. Grocery stores tend to label sweet potatoes as yams. So-called "yams" that look like sweet potatoes are sweet potatoes. If you go to an ethnic grocery store where they sell true yams and you see what yams look like you'll realize that they are really not much like sweet potatoes. In fact I've never seen a yam in a standard supermarket, every "yam" I've ever seen in one was a sweet potato.

[Stephen]

An interesting post. I respect your Vegan choice. As a long time gardener and observer of the intrinsic life force within tiny seeds, the harvest of mute flora is no less murder than the taking of fauna life. Sentience is a continuum. Because we can't hear the screams, doesn't mean they are not there. We are a subspecies of omnivores-rapacious in our gluttony. For me the moral choice is not one or the other but less, with regret, humility and living a life that is worthy enough to justify being sustained by the death of "food."

[cybermome1207]

My daughter home from college is vegan.So everything except turkey and desserts will be vegan
I too made a vegan pumpkin pie for her. I did not use tofu though I used soy milk and corn starch
One of my favorites is the edamame mashed potatoes. I use yukon gold pototes and earth balance
soy butter. And this year I added a little bit of vinegar to the soy milk to make butter milk.

[QueenCeleste]

Your pie sounds delicious! And I'm exhausted just reading about your machinations. Well, I admire you tremendously for going vegan. It ain't easy! But it surely is worth it.

Hope you have a truly lovely Thanksgiving.

[REAL cook 1977]

I doubt the author is going vegan. She is using this to get published and look different. It isn't working - she just knows the right people.