Welcome

Welcome to the Vegan Physicist blog!

About me

My name is Henrik. I am a vegan and I am a physicist. Hence the blog name. Simple really.

I was born and raised in Sweden and currently live in Toronto, Canada, with my wife. I enjoy cooking, exploring different cuisines and talking about food from different countries with people. Since our move to Toronto, we have encountered many (to us) new cuisines, dishes and ingredients. Toronto is truly a haven for meetings between different cultures – out of the 6 million people in the greater metropolitan area, half were born outside of Canada! Going to the normal grocery store is an adventure and we often see vegetables and other ingredients we had never heard of before our move (let alone would be able to find anywhere in Sweden).

This multitude of cuisines and ingredients is very inspiring and has led us to try many new dishes. However, very often the dishes we encounter are not vegan so in order to try them, we have to make them ourselves. This is sometimes challenging but always very interesting.

About this blog

In this blog, I will push myself into actively seeking out new dishes, rather than stumbling across them. In order to do this somewhat systematically – a semi-scientific approach –  I decided to ‘simply’ cook one dish from every single country on the planet. This is the main weekly goal. I also very much enjoy science and especially the physics, chemistry and biology involved in cooking. I won’t be able to resist writing a bit about the science of some different cooking methods and ingredients.

One dish per country

I will cook at least one dish from every single country on the planet. A quick visit to Wikipedia gives the current count of sovereign states as 206 ​[1]​. If I ‘visit’ one country per week, this will take 4 years. That is a massive undertaking.

Choosing one dish per country is not just unfair. It is incredibly, inconceivably, glaringly obviously unfair. A single main and maybe a few sides cannot begin to cover thousands of years of culinary history shared by millions of people in a country. Reducing a giant country like China or India with a billion people each, both covering large areas with multiple climates, geography regions and ethnic groups to a single dish is insane. Is India best represented by creamy dal makhni from Punjab, crunchy pani puri from the streets of Mumbai or a few steamed breakfast idli with coconut chutney from Chennai?

Instead large countries should in all likelihood be represented by one dish per province/state. But that would add 22 weeks for China, 28 weeks for India, 85 weeks for Russia etc. And besides, where do you draw the line between large, multidish-countries and single meal countries? One dish per country it has to be.

How to choose that one dish

The next question is, what dish do you pick to represent a whole country? The only answer I have is that there is no objective way to do it. Instead I will take the unscientific route and pick

• a dish I know and like and want to showcase; or
• a meal that incorporates a, to me, unfamiliar ingredient or technique; or
• something recommended by people I know; or
• a dish which is suggested during this adventure; or
• something that fits with other recipes on this blog; and
• is vegan or convertible without too much loss.

One thing that makes this choice easier is that culinary regions are not based on countries: often neighbors share ingredients and food culture to at least some degree. If I find many interesting dishes for one country, chances are I can find neighbors that also make one or more of the dishes, giving me an opportunity to feature multiple dishes and tick of a few extra countries.

Disclaimer

I will try to cook one or more dishes for every country on the planet. Obviously, I am not from 99.5% of the countries. Best case scenario is that I know someone from the country and have visited it myself. Most of the time though, my research is based on different websites and books, without me ever tasting the real dish (which often is non-vegan anyway).
In other words: these recipes are not authentic but I hope you will enjoy my renditions and veganized versions of this small sample of the world’s different cuisines.