🎃 Halloween special: heretic cocktail sauce (vegan, or not?)

A recipe for a cocktail sauce which leans on heresy for its use of a specific, unusual ingredient. And at the same time it is unsure to fit the definition of veganism. Spooky!

Serves: a number of humans, ghosts, and witches; actually, it depends how much you make of it, and how much you spread, or dip

Preparation: 5 minutes

The cocktail sauce, in a small bowl — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I usually post every first Tuesday of the month — except when I don't, like in 2023 Feb - Jun. I had shot pictures for this recipe a while (read: a year) ago, and I could only publish it outside of the regular, full-fledged article series — posting the 3 ingredients substitute to grated cheese recipe felt like a filler to me afterward).

Cocktail sauce is a condiment, whose recipe differs depending where you get it from; for example, in Europe, it’s rather a creamy pink liquid. Although cocktail sauce is popular with seafood, one can enjoy it to dip something else (fries, anyone?), or even to spread it in a burger. I liked cocktail sauce during my pre-vegan era, and I occasionally bought it from the stores. I never researched how I could make my own. After a 48-hour long murder mystery game, I caught a friend alone in the kitchen, pouring a golden liquid into a bowl along with other ingredients. Maybe it was the side-effect of the murder mystery game, though she really looked like she was secretely poisoning the food. She explained to me how she was preparing a cocktail sauce to serve with the barbecue concluding our week-end.

Since I like to experiment, and that I fancy whisky, I prepared the cocktail sauce from time to time with some of the different bottles I had — only “some” because there are red lines I didn’t dare crossing. In August 2022, I returned from Iceland with two different bottles of local whisky; one had a very (very) strong, unusual flavor, which turned out to make the best cocktail sauce.

This recipe is tagged as “heretic” for two reasons. First, it recommends to use a specific whisky, a pretty rare ingredient. Second, the very same ingredient raises the question of the boundaries of what is vegan, and what is not.

Is this actually vegan?

Two bottles of Flóki Icelandic whisky: the left one uses sheep dung smoked young malt, while the right one is a single malt which draws wooden notes from its birch cask finish — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The recipe further below instructs to use a peated, or smokey whisky, while it recommends a specific version of Flóki whisky, from Eimverk. At the time of writing, Eimverk is still the only distillery in Iceland producing whisky, and they strive to make it as local as possible. They grow their own barley, which benefits from the short and intense Icelandic Summer. For the whisky this recipe recommends, Eimverk relies on a traditional smoking method to dry malted barley: burning sheep dung.

Sheeps are pretty much everywhere in Iceland. Drive long enough, and you’ll have anecdotes of how you (hopefully) avoided collisions with sheeps crossing the road. They’ve been in Iceland for long, and farmers had burned their dung to heat their homes for centuries.

So, the process to make this whisky relies on an animal-originating material; although it’s not a derived product, it can be considered as a by-product of sheep farming. Can it be considered vegan, then? On one hand, the mention of a product coming from an animal is a clear red flag that it’s not vegan. On the other hand, sheeps are not bred and raised for the purpose of making this whisky. Wikipedia defines veganism as “the practice of abstaining from the use of all animal products—particularly in diet—and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. A person who follows the diet or philosophy is known as a vegan.”

What’s your take about this whisky, and this cocktail sauce? Is it vegan, or not?

Ingredients

Yet another 3-ingredient recipe — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

• Vegan mayonnaise

• Ketchup

• Flóki Young Malt Sheep Dung Smoked Reserve whisky; otherwise, use another whisky, preferably peated, or smokey

Preparation

The preparation steps are straight-forward: assemble the three ingredients, then mix them together. There are no Cooking steps afterward.

1. Add vegan mayonnaise

2. Add the same amount of ketchup

3. Add 1 soup spoon of whisky

4. Stir gently all ingredients together

5. Taste

6. Add more whisky if required; in doubt, don’t

7. Stir gently

Step 4: stirring gently the ingredients together — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Once prepared, the sauce doesn’t need to rest before you can serve it. I spread it on vegan patties in my burger, and I dip potatoes in it. Beware that whisky usually ranges from from 40° to 45° alcohol. Based on how much you poured into it, and on how much you eat of the cocktail sauce, you could end up being intoxicated by the amount of alcohol it contains — eat responsibly, don’t get drunk.

You can prepare this cocktail sauce ahead of consuming it. Just be sure to store it in your fridge inside a sealable container, otherwise it will dry, and you’ll have a weird skin forming on its top. Consume within three days, though it rarely lasts so long at home.

The cocktail sauce, finished preparing — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Enjoy!

If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment - whether you loved it, or hated it — please do so! I’m welcoming ideas, even if these are non-vegan recipes I’ll have the challenge to “veganize”.

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Here’s a tip before you go

You can use this cocktail sauce as a marinade for tofu, soy filet pieces, or other meat or fish substitute. You can also experiment by adding a load of the cocktail sauce to your homemade vegan patties. The alcohol will slightly evaporate during the cooking process, however the taste will stay.

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