Yes, ve-gan! Animal-free feasts

Even vegans crave steak now and then – which is where Gaz Oakley and his meat-free burgers come in. Suddenly, Veganuary looks a lot more palatable. By Amy Bryant. Photographs by Simon Smith

‘I GET THE ODD marriage proposal,’ says Gaz Oakley with a laugh. ‘More than the odd one, in fact.’ With 164,000 Instagram followers and more than 250,000 subscribers to his Youtube channel, Oakley is in hot demand, and not just because of his hipsterish charm and glinting grin. Since launching Avantgarde Vegan on the photo-sharing platform in February 2016, Oakley has become a star of the meat-free world, and his recipes have gained the respect of herbivores and carnivores alike. Such has been the success of his more recent Youtube channel (where he cooks everything from vegan hot dogs to ‘fish’ and chips), he didn’t even have time to mark its first birthday, which passed by a week before we speak. ‘I was filming videos so didn’t have a chance to celebrate,’ he says. ‘It’s all gone so quickly, as if it happened almost overnight.’

Avant-garde Vegan began simply as an outlet for Cardiff-born Oakley to show his friends what he was eating, after he decided to turn vegan two-anda-half years ago – a decision that was itself, he admits, very much an ‘overnight’ thing. ‘I was training in the gym a lot and my diet was very high in protein. I was 23; your typical meat-eater, really.’

After a lot of research, and in a bid to be ‘as healthy as possible’, Oakley transformed his diet, stripping it of fish, meat and dairy. He quickly found that he had to ‘learn to cook in a completely different style’ – but luckily he had four years of cheffing experience to fall back on for

His signature creations include barbecue ribs and ‘KFC’ (kruelty-free chicken) burgers

inspiration. ‘When I left school at 16, all I wanted to do was become a full-time chef, and I dreamed of getting a Michelin star by the age of 22,’ he tells me. He worked his way up in restaurant kitchens until he was 20, by which time Oakley had nailed the classic techniques but also learned the ‘tough’ reality of putting in 80-hour weeks at the stove. ‘I was physically unable to do it any more,’ he recalls.

Turning vegan, then, was the impetus he needed to return to the kitchen, and he fell back on his professional skills to make the leap from the ‘basics of mixed-bean chilli and hummus’, to his signature creations of barbecue ribs and ‘KFC’ (kruelty-free chicken) burgers – the ‘veganised’ meat meals that launched Oakley to Youtube stardom, and form the basis of his debut book, Vegan 100. After all, tomato soup and stuffed aubergine are all very well (and with spicy chickpeas in the former and paprika-spiked passata in the latter, Oakley’s versions are a cut above the usual fare), but it’s his choice of familiar, often nostalgic, inevitably fast-food dishes that are the key to his success; those that many new vegans sorely miss, such as mac ’n’ cheese and dauphinoise potatoes. ‘I constantly get requests to veganise things and often find that they taste better than the original.’

Oakley’s approach requires a certain quota of special ingredients: to achieve a creamy ‘butter’, he uses lecithin granules made from soy-bean oil; while to mimic the stretch of cheese, he adds tapioca starch. His convincingly meatlike steaks and beef Wellington get their texture from seitan, or vital wheat gluten, which is made by washing the starch from flour to leave the sticky, cookable gluten. In other dishes, liquid smoke, agar agar and nutritional yeast are put to use– but for a generation of cooks who have grown used to sourcing ingredients online, this barely diminishes their plate appeal.

‘Some people might think, why on earth would you recreate meat dishes?’ he says. ‘I do it because it is possible.’ And with next season’s videos and a second book in the making – not to mention the ‘overwhelming’ responses he gets from fans – Oakley happily admits, ‘it’s as good as getting a Michelin star.’ Vegan 100, by Gaz Oakley, is published by Quadrille (£20). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk