My Balls
From The Sexy Vegan Cookbook by Brian Patton. Here they are! For the whole planet to behold ... My Balls! You can place them atop a pile of spaghetti or line them up in a hoagie roll, smother them with tomato sauce and your favorite vegan cheese, and bake for a killer ball-parm sando.
Ingredients
- 4 ounces tempeh
- 1/2 cup raw walnuts
- 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
- 1 teaspoon minced fresh Italian parsley
- 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1/4 teaspoon dried basil
- 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
- 2 cloves garlic roughly chopped
- 1/4 cup diced yellow onion
- 1/2 teaspoon vegan Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tablespoon tomato paste
- 1 teaspoon low-sodium tamari or soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil plus more to lube the baking sheet and coat the balls
- Salt and pepper
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F.
- Using a steamer basket, steam the tempeh for 25 minutes to soften it. Then let it cool.
- In a food processor, combine the walnuts, nutritional yeast, parsley, oregano, basil, thyme, garlic, onion, Worcestershire, tomato paste, tamari, water, and oil, and process until you have a semi-moist meal.
- In a bowl, crumble the steamed tempeh with your hands until there are no big chunks left. Then add the mixture from the food processor to the bowl, plus a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, and mash it all together with your hands. You will now be able to form this mass into little balls. Make them just a bit smaller than beer-pong balls (depending on when and where you went to college, you may know them as Ping-Pong balls), about 12 inches in diameter.
- Lube up a baking sheet with the oil, lay the balls on it, coat them with a little more oil, and bake for 30 minutes. My balls are now ready for consumption.