Posted on January 31, 2010.
Where can I find vegetarian suet in Australia, or is it possible to do yourself? I hope to make a ball Cloot traditional Scottish, but the recipe calls for tallow (animal fat that is). In the United Kingdom, you can get a vegetarian suet - but I'm in Oz right now and nobody has ever heard of suet! Does anybody know where I could get a vegetarian alternative or anyone know how I could do myself or add an ingredient in its place?
Thank you
According VNV:
"Suet in revenue can be replaced by vegetable margarines (eg Nuttelex)."
http://www.vnv.org.au/site/index.php?opt ...
On most sites that mention vegetarian suet (which seem to have copied word for word from each other):
"A substitute vegetarian suet is available in supermarkets in the United Kingdom which is made of fat, like palm oil combined with rice flour. It resembles shredded beef suet, and is used as a substitute in recipes, but with slightly different animal tallow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suet
Thus, you assume you can make your own oil palm (you can get from where?) And rice flour!
From a forum on the website of Jamie Oliver, you get conflicting opinions about the taste of the product in the United Kingdom:
"You can get vegetarian tallow, made from palm oil and rice flour.
Otherwise, the closest alternative is grated frozen butter.
"As I have a daughter vegetarian, I use vegetable tallow Atora now and I really can not tell the difference."
"There is something sold as" vegetable suet "available - but I can not really recommend it."
"When looking for a replacement for tallow in the past, I have, with some success, used frozen grated butter (must be frozen to grid). This is not quite the same, but it is reasonably practicable .
"I always use frozen grated butter (I can not tallow here) and it works a treat"
http://www.jamieoliver.com/forum/viewtop ...
On a forum on the website of Delia:
"I used vegetarian suet for the first time this year and I must say that I do not like it! My meat has a different texture and more than that, after reading the ingredients, it contains 47% of hydrogenated vegetable oil. This is one of the doctors tell us to avoid! Next year I will go back to using butter! I used this last year and I was very pleased with the results. Normally, when you use butter, it is advisable to freeze IT and then grate it, but it's a terrible job to do, I finally decided very finely and mix that in and it works great! "
http://www.deliaonline.com/messageboard/ ...