Chedda Lentil Biscuits

I remember when Jo Stepaniak's revolutionary "Uncheese Cookbook" hit the stores. It was the early 1990s.  I'd been vegan only a couple of years, and there were no plant-based "cheezes" for sale in the grocery stores,  The idea of making your own cheese-like recipes using nutritional yeast was something I had never considered, and since cheese had been far more important to my diet than meat had before going vegan...this was a really BIG deal for me!

The red book came out first and it was like finding a secret door in my house that I never noticed before, but which opened into a vast and exciting new world.  I loved every recipe of hers, and many of them and the recipes in her updated edition (the blue book) are still staples when I make meals or entertain.

So when I started making bread rolls using soaked red lentils one of the first things I wanted to do was to see if I could use this approach to make rolls like Stepaniak's Chedda Biscuits (page 114 in the red book) and here is what I came up with:

Ingredients:
2 cups of red lentils picked over, rinsed and soaked for 3 hours
5 TBS psyllium powder (not unground husks!)
5 TBS nutritional yeast
1 TBS onion powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dill weed
1 tsp salt (optional)
1/2 tsp ground yellow mustard powder
1/2 cup soymilk (I use Edensoy unsweetened)
1/2 cup finely chopped sweet red pepper -- pressed tight to measure
3 TBS lemon juice


Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350. F and place either a silicone baking sheet or parchment paper onto a cookie tray and set aside.
2. Place the psyllium powder, nutritional yeast, onion powder, baking soda, garlic powder, garlic, mustard and salt (if using) into a large bowl and mix well with a wire whisk or fork, and set aside
3. Place the soymilk, peppers and lemon juice into a powerful blender and blend on high for about a minute until peppers are entirely blended into the milk.
4. Fill a separate bowl with about 2 cups of tap water and set it on the counter near where the prepared cookie tray is -- you will use it to dip your hands into before forming each roll so they don't stick to your hands.
5. Thoroughly drain the lentils in a strainer and add them to the blender, with and blend on high for a couple of minutes until creamy, then pour this mix into the bowl of dry ingredients and quickly mix with a spatula just enough so there is nothing dry left.
6. Working quickly, dip your hands into the water and then use the spatula to grab about 2-3 TBS (depending upon how big you'd like your rolls to be) of the lentil "dough" and place it into your wet hands -- toss it back and forth rolling it into a ball and then set it onto the tray.  Wet your hands and repeat this until you have used up all the batter, leaving about 1 inch of room between the rolls.
   
7.  Pop the tray into the oven and bake for about 20 minutes just until they begin to brown.  Let them cool before slicing and they will firm up inside.