How can we miss croissant in France? I found the BEST vegan croissant! A MUST-try in Paris!!
Gentle Gourmet Cafe is a fine dining vegan restaurant in the 12th district of Paris. I went there for a French breakfast. It's better to make a reservation a day before even for breakfast. The cafe opens at 8am. I was there at 8.15am, but it wasn't ready. Luckily, they let me in and waited.
I was very hungry and the kitchen was still warming up. I decided to order something quick: croissant and a cup of coffee with heavy cream =]
The croissant really surprised me. A
vegan croissant is difficult to make well, as it requires a lot of butter to give the layering and fluffiness and the pleasant smell. Usually vegetable margarine can't replace it well, but this one has almost the same taste as a normal croissant!!
Plus it had a blink blink surface, which is usually a brush of egg. I guess it was a brush of soya milk and sugar mixture (learned in the vegan dessert class, write about that later).
A chocolate dip came separate. It tasted so much like nutexxx!! That's a bonus to me.
The coffee is good as well, and I was very satisfied with the heavy cream on it. It was smooth and light sweet.
The cafe was serving a late summer menu. Half an hour later my full breakfast came to the table. I ordered a creamy scramble tofu with baguette.
The ingredients in the scramble tofu was a perfect match: smoked vegan ham, mushrooms, shallots and asparagus. Especially the asparagus made a well balance with the sauce. One fresh and light, one creamy and heavy. The smoked vegan ham was firm tofu strips actually. If you expected something resembles ham, that might be a bit disappointing. I'm a big fan of tofu products, so again that was a bonus for me! The baguette was herbed rather that just plain.
The meal was quite cosy, but imagine how many times you can try a vegan croissant! At least chill for an hour or two with a coffee and the vegan croissant there!!
I had a nice Italian pizza and ice-cream... Check the ice-cream store and you may be surprised how many vegan flavour they had... the one I went had 6~7! The pizza was a take-away near the Sacre Coeur. Simply order a vegetarian pizza without cheese, then it turns into a vegan pizza =] The ingredients were abundant: aubergine, olives, tomato, mushrooms, pepper, etc. The pizza was baked fresh after the order. The base was a medium.
Rice Pudding是很適合初學者的甜品，以椰漿和豆奶代替牛奶就可以了。這亦是大蕃薯第一次接觸Saffron這種香料，有種水果的淸甜，一小撮就能為整鍋布甸畫龍點睛！跟雲尼拿、橙香、提子乾等配合來煮飯亦很不錯。
