Pumpkin Fondue Ultimate Dipper (Camembert Alternative)

Hey guys!

For the holiday recipes, I introduced a few but I was thinking about classics that people love to eat over the winter and when I went grocery shopping I saw that there was loads of camemberts which are delish! I think that the basis is like a fondue, and I had some colourful pumpkins and squash left over, and thought… that’s an awesome container for some cheesey dips, and I went back to my ‘burger cheese’ sauce which is a recipe that’s slightly different to most vegan cheeses as it’s based on potatoes. You know when you over mash potatoes and they go gloopy and glue like? The starch molecule explodes and they form a glue and it’s similar to melted mozarella, it’s very clever and its great to use as a base.

Ingredients

• Flour (2 dsp)

• Butter (2 dsp)

• Salt (1 tsp)

• White Pepper (1 Tsp)

• Oat Milk (10 dsp)

• Mustard (half tsp)

• Turmeric (for colour)

• 10 chopped pickle gerkins

• 10 chopped pickled jalapeños (optional)

• Onion Powder (1 Tsp)

• Garlic Powder (1 Tsp)

• Chives (2 tsp)

• Vegan Honey (1 tsp)

• Nutritional Yeast (2 tsp)

• Waxy Potatoes (1 potato)

• Bread to Serve

• Optional Sides (cabbage or butter lettuce)

So the first thing I wanted to do was scoop all the innards out of this pumpkin squash and then roast it so that all the internal flesh wasn’t raw, this took about 30 minutes on 180 c in my oven with some olive oil. You cut the top off, you use a knife to make a rough shape and then use a spoon to remove the seeds and the stringy bits. If you wanted to make this more of a butternut squash base, you could in fact keep the left over good pieces to boil with the potatoes, but I thought it might compromise on the texture so I skipped it.

I then put on a boil in a sauce pan, and threw in about 4 large waxy potatoes, they just have to be high in starch. I didn’t use all of them as you will see, but I just wanted to see the quantity I would need when experimenting with this one. Once boiling, turn down to a simmer and watch for about ten minutes until you can push down on the potatoes with a spoon and they easily break apart. Then the trick is to drain them, and whilst they’re still very hot blast them with a heavy hand blender, and this will essentially cause the starch to pop and turn into this mozarella like gloop. If you were to mash them with a manual masher, this would not happen unless you went crazy, so it’s sort of like a science experiment haha.

In a second frying pan, add your butter, I used pure as it’s my go to alternative and then your white flour. Cook on a medium until they form a doughy ball at the base, working out the lumps. It’s the easy roux. Once the paste is cooked out, at your room temperature milk and start to stir on a low heat. You can use a whisk if you find any lumps, it’s easy though just wait til it thickens slightly and you have your cheese sauce base. Throw in all your ingredients, the turmeric for colour, the honey, the chopped pickles, go spicy if you like or omit that if you don’t fancy the chilli heat. Chives, onion and garlic powders, mustard, salt, pepper, nutritional yeast. Mix thoroughly and start feeding spoonfuls of the gloopy potatoes into the mix on a very low heat, until they start to form a thicker, melted cheese like texture.

I added some salted butter alternative because I thought it was missing something and then I added a dash of lemon, I don’t know if this is a major requirement but it gave it a sourness and a salty ness that I thought made it a little more intense. You can also finish with black sulphur salt which is a finishing salt that has an eggy, cheesey flavour. It’s just me trying to find out how to make it as much like cheese as possible, and it worked pretty well. The pickles give it a really yummy dip quality, you can leave them out but if you do want it to be as similar to this, use a spoonful of the brine, the pickles give it a quality that i don’t really know how to describe. So it’s changeable.

Then serve in the warm roasted pumpkin, get some seeded bread, broccoli or any kind of dips, and enjoy!

Let me know now if you try this at home.