Wings, pizza, burgers, and hotdogs are all delicious, but not exactly friendly to vegetarians.
Super Bowl party fare is traditionally salty, cheesy, greasy, and meaty. Wings, pizza, burgers, dogs, and bacon-flecked, creamy dips—all delicious, but not exactly friendly to vegetarians.
Eating meat and watching footballs are still—in the year 2022—branded as masculine activities, while avoiding meat and eating more vegetables remains feminine-coded (at least if you ask the Barstool crowd, who seem to hate women and vegetables in equal parts).
But vegetarians and vegans (and even women!) can enjoy a football game, and if you plan to invite them to your Big Game party, you should be prepared to serve something they can eat. We have a few suggestions.
If you simply must go the uncanny meat route, please, for the love of taste, brown and season your Impossible patties. I will always choose a smash burger over a thick one, but tech meats tend to be a little stickier than their bovine-based inspiration. Luckily, there is a very easy, elegant solution:Pre-smashing—which we have discussed before—gives you a large amount of surface area, without as much stickage. In beef burgers, pre-smashing can lead to shrinkage, but that does not happen with meat-free burgers, thanks to their extra stickiness.
Photo: JeniFoto (Shutterstock)
Chef Amanda Cohen has been serving her iconic broccoli dogs at Dirt Candy since 2008, so she knows a thing or 20 about imparting flavor into vegetables. The key to making that flavor stick, like so many things, is fat:
The thing with smoking a vegetable versus smoking a piece of animal protein is vegetables don’t come with their own source of fat,” Chef Cohen explained to me over email. “When you smoke animal protein, it absorbs the smoke and it mixes with the fat, and you get this really delicious, intoxicating product. When you smoke a vegetable, it’s not porous. It’s not going to soak in the smoke. And the smoke itself is basically just attaching itself to the outside. You want to have a great big surface, so that you get the flavor in as many places as possible. But you also have to finish cooking it in a fat. You have to add fat into the vegetable—like you already have existing in a piece of animal protein—to make it that delicious.”
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Photo: Claire Lower
Even more so than Impossible meat, soyrizo is almost impossible to clock as vegetarian when it’s simmered into a vat of chili and served with all the usual accoutrement. (Add a little espresso powder to make it extra convincing.) Even better, soyrizo Frito pie is easy to make, easy to serve, and utterly delicious:Somewhere between chili and a hot, cheesy dip—but far easier to serve than either of those—Frito pie is basically the ideal snack for a large, rowdy gathering. Making it mostly involves dumping assorted cans and bags into an Instant Pot or slow cooker and ignoring it for several hours. Plus, instead of individual bowls or a communal pot of dip, Frito pie is served straight out of a bag of Fritos—it’s entirely self-contained.
Brussels sprouts beat out spinach in terms of taste and texture (plus, they’re in season):What’s better: a limp, thawed leaf, or a crunchy, browned, crispy leaf? I think the latter, my friends. Spinach does not get brown or crisp, it only gets wet and small. Brussels sprouts, on the other hand, crisp and brown quite nicely in a little butter (or duck fat), and keep much more of their original volume than spinach, which might as well be called “The Incredible Shrinking Green Thing.”
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