Vegan Pepesup

A longer and more detailed description

Look, I know every dish I make is soup, but do you know why that is? It’s because soup is delicious. There’s so many things you can do with soup. You can make thick soups, thin soups, hot soups, cold soups, every kind of soup, and all you need is a big pot and some heat. They’re the universal human experience. Everyone makes soup.

Also, it’s easy, and I am ferociously lazy.

Today’s soup is a West African soup, which personally, I think always guarantees something interesting. Start by heating broth in a big pot. Once the broth is boiling, add your first guests into the hot springs. Add your onions, garlic, ginger, bay leaf, seaweed, and a dash of soy sauce to the pot, making sure to peer inside to see how they’re all getting along. Once you’ve confirmed everyone is happily bubbling away in the pot, add your habaneros. Make sure you add them in whole unless you want to die. Lower the heat from hot spring to sauna, and let everyone have a nice soak in the broth.

While the vegetables are enjoying the broth, make yourself some vaguely seafood flavoured tofu. Pepesup is a seafood soup, but as per usual, we’re avoiding processed foods in this series, so we’re going to try our own substitution. Mix ketjap manis, soy sauce, syrup, garlic powder, and onion powder in a bowl, then give it a good mixy mix. Dump in your tofu. I’ll pretend I mixed it for your sake, but you and I both know I seized the sides of that bowl, shook it, and yelled the whole time. I’ll let you pick whichever option brings you more joy.

Once the tofu is thoroughly marinated, add it, any remaining marinade, and the mushrooms into the broth. Bring the heat back up to a boil, then lower it again. Let the soup simmer until you’re ready to eat (but at least five minutes, we’re not barbarians here). Just before you eat the soup, though, there’s one final, extremely important step. Fish your peppers out of the broth and crush them against the side of the pot, letting the guts dribble down into the broth. The more heat you want, the more you should crush. After they’re crushed, either fish the peppers’ remains out of the soup or leave them if you want the soup to get even hotter. Give everything one more mix, then serve. Buen provecho!

Suggestions and substitutions

For the mushroom broth: Both vegetable broth and water are acceptable substitutes here. I just really like mushrooms, so went for the mushrooms.
For the ketjap manis: We’re looking for a sweeter soy sauce here. I went to the far sweet end with ketjap manis, but tamari is also fine. You can also substitute soy sauce and a bit of sugar if you have neither ketjap manis nor tamari.
For the tofu and oyster mushrooms: Both of these are substituting in for seafood, and both could be swapped for a seafood substitute of your choice. You can also slice your mushrooms into strips rather than rough chunks, or skip the tofu marinade. Entirely up to you and your preferences.
For the habaneros: Any spicy pepper will work here, and what pepper you add will impact the heat of the soup. I personally really like spicy, so I added two habaneros, which did make it decently spicy. You can add more or fewer peppers, but I do recommend adding at least one.

What I changed to make it vegan

Pepesup is, at its core, a seafood soup, and seafood is, believe it or not, not vegan. I think I’ve actually gotten weirdly good at making vegan seafood dishes, and this one is no exception. Oyster mushrooms make for a fairly good wet fish substitute, and the tofu, while not texturally like shrimp, at least taste-wise gets close to it. More importantly, though, both the tofu and the mushrooms are just good in this soup on their own, with the seaweed adding that important little nautical kick.

What to listen to while you cook

I listened to Desmali y Dambo de la Costa. While it wasn’t my favourite music, it was a fun little atmosphere for my merrily bubbling soup.

A brief context for this dish

Equatoguinean cuisine is heavily informed by its location on the sea. For many in the country, fishing is a fundamental part of life, and so seafood features heavily in the dishes of the country. It’s also defined by the fruits and vegetables of its lush inland jungles, with yucca, malanga, and plantain being served at most meals. Also much like its neighbours, Equatoguinean cuisine is a blend of a huge variety of influences, ranging from traditional West African dishes, to dishes from neighbouring Cameroon, to dishes influenced and inspired by its former coloniser, Spain.

Most of all, though, Equatoguinean cuisine is defined by spice.

While peppers are not native to Africa, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been adopted in spades throughout the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Equatorial Guinea. Here, spice is king, and nowhere is that clearly than in their litany of soups and stews.

Pepesup specifically has a reputation as medicinal, being served not only as a hangover cure at pubs, but also as a way to stimulate breastmilk production in new mothers and a general cure-all for colds and flus. If something ails you, pepesup is the cure.

As with many of the folk remedies we’ve discussed in this series, the idea that peppers can help cure what ails you isn’t necessarily just folklore. Research has shown that peppers have a variety of unexpected health benefits, including helping with rheumatism, arthritis, chest colds, and headaches. People who eat spicy peppers are less likely to die of cancer and diabetes, and its antimicrobial properties make it a valuable tool in preserving food. While much of this can be attributed to the capsaicin, let’s be honest, eating a hot pepper is more interesting than chugging straight capsaicin.

Which, to be clear, is dangerous. Don’t chug straight capsaicin.

(Source: Rumarfarm.ca)

This is one of the ironies of capsaicin and hot peppers more generally. Peppers produce capsaicin specifically because they don’t want mammals eating them. Pepper seeds are most effectively spread by birds, and so, random mammals eating the peppers doesn’t help that pepper grow in any meaningful way. For all mammals, the capsaicin in peppers is an irritant, meant to ward us away from interacting with it by making our hands and mouths burn. For most mammals, I suspect this works. After all, most critters don’t like it when they burn, and very spicy peppers cause a lot of burning.

But humans are notoriously bad at self-preservation, and so, rather than being discouraged by capsaicin, we’ve sought it out. Ironically, this has probably been evolutionarily great for peppers. Rather than existing solely in the Americas, they’re now a staple of world cuisine, growing wherever people go, happily letting us poison ourselves every step of the way.

Again, ironic. We really are very silly creatures.

The delight of pepesup is that it, in many ways, encapsulates this relationship with hot peppers. It’s spicy, and everyone knows it’s spicy, but in that spice lies a delicious and surprisingly beneficial world. It’s a delight, and definitely one of my favourite soups so far.