Holiday Cooking with Soylent
Chicken and waffles made with Soylent. Image: Dan Nosowitz

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Holiday Cooking with Soylent

Don't do it.

Soylent, the Reddit-approved ​meal-replacement in powder form, is an offensive concept. "Robert Rhinehart and team developed Soylent after recognizing the disproportionate amount of time and money they spent creating nutritionally complete meals," reads the product's site. The idea is that entire concept of preparing and consuming food, an activity that has become synonymous with culture itself, is like an appendix, a vestigial remnant of a dumber time. Soylent's manifesto is the equivalent of replacing sex with an electronic sensation-free testicle-draining appendage that straps onto your crotch like an insulin meter. Depriving yourself of pleasure in the name of efficiency sounds to me like precisely the wrong way to go about being a human.

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That said, I am, somehow, right now at least, primarily  ​a food writer. (I don't know how it happened, either. Getting fired from my last full-time job probably had something to do with it.) And as a food writer it's my responsibility to at least look at modern food trends, even if they are so stupid that they are more a gimmick or curiosity than an actual trend, because to be a trend I think at least some people need to think it's a good idea.

The fine people at Motherboard gave me, I think, ​all the Soylent they had, a whopping five large packets, some 20 meal's worth. I will be attempting to give almost all of it back at some point soon. My task: figure out some way to cook with this stuff. So I decided to try it and then to make some kind of homey yet elaborate, centerpiece meal. If you were the type to drink Soylent, and you had family over for the holidays, and you wanted to prove to them that this is a good, worthwhile project, what would you make to satisfy but also impress them?

The first thing I did was follow the package's instructions, which are presented like the instruction manual for a USB dongle. The Soylent itself is pale tan and somewhere between the textures of all-purpose flour and powdered sugar. It smells mostly like Bisquick. You pour an entire package into a Soylent-branded pitcher, add water, and shake vigorously to combine. Then you add in this little travel-shampoo-bottle-sized bottle of oil, apparently a mix of canola and algal oil which smells like mild fish oil, add a little more water, and shake again. I was expecting the concoction to be thick, like a vegetable smoothie, but it's not at all. It's about the consistency of chocolate milk—only very slightly more viscous than water.

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It tastes kind of gross. More than anything it tastes like you vigorously mixed Bisquick with water; it has that kind of raw flour taste, a faint sweetness, a flavor reminiscent of but not really like vanilla. And it's grainy, not smooth. Because I kept thinking, over and over, "this is like gross Bisquick," I tried to think of a recipe that might call for Bisquick, that could be replaced with Soylent, and that I might conceivably set down in a big platter in the center of a table for family during the holidays. The answer came quickly: chicken and waffles.

Soylent already tastes like a computer's idea of vanilla

To make the waffles, I started out trying to follow a basic Belgian waffle recipe before realizing about three words into the first step that I couldn't use the liquid Soylent I'd already made. But I followed it as close as I could: a mix of Soylent and a little all-purpose flour, in a ratio of about 2:1. I added less sugar than the recipe called for, because Soylent is already pretty sweet, and also a little less vanilla extract, because Soylent already tastes like a computer's idea of vanilla. I separated eggs, beat the yolks and added a little milk and melted butter, and separately beat the whites to a stiff peak. Then I added everything together, and spent maybe another 20 minutes trying to get the batter to look right. It was too liquid, too bland, too sweet. Eventually it looked like a waffle batter, sort of. I poured it into my waffle maker, which immediately began emitting smoke. I don't blame it.

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The waffles turned out…fine. They never really developed the crunch that I look for in a waffle, no matter how high I turned up the heat on the waffle maker. Though limp, and distinctly Soylent-y, they tasted okay, certainly much better than the liquid Soylent I made. I ate the first test waffle with some fake syrup-flavored sugar (what, you think I'm going to waste real maple syrup on this?) and turned my attention to the fried chicken.

I followed Bobby Flay's fried chicken recipe almost exactly. I like Bobby Flay; he knows what he likes, and what he likes is chipotles and blue corn. Dude's still cooking, like, oven-roasted chicken breast stuffed with blue cheese. And why the hell not? It still tastes good. You keep doing you, Bobby Flay. Anyway. I did not let the chicken (I used drumsticks) sit in buttermilk, because I was pretty sure this chicken was going to be disgusting and what's the point of spending 24 hours on a buttermilk brine for garbage? I replaced three-quarters of the flour in the recipe with Soylent, and because Soylent is sweet, boosted the salt and spice a little from Bobby's recipe. I heated up some oil in my dutch oven (I did a shallow fry rather than a deep fry because I don't often deep fry and it seemed a waste to use a gallon of canola oil just the once), brought the chicken up to room temperature, dipped it in the Soylent batter, and fried it.

Soylent burns, it turns out. Not horribly, but it certainly cooked faster than an ordinary flour-based batter would have. By the time the chicken was done, and these were pretty small pieces of chicken, parts of the Soylent were, as best I could tell, overcooked. (How do you even know when Soylent is overcooked? I'm just guessing.) But the batter held onto the chicken really nicely, and certainly did crisp up. I sampled some of the little bits of Soylent batter that had dripped separately into the pot and they were tasty, in the way that anything fried in a pot of oil is tasty, meaning it tasted like oil and was crispy.

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The chicken, like the waffle, was just okay. Despite my efforts to bump up the salt and spice, it remained sweet and vanilla-y, which is sort of an unnerving flavor for chicken even though I poured maple syrup over the top of it for serving. I added about three times as much salt and twice as much powdered chile as good old Bobby Flay requested, and I still thought it was underseasoned and lacking entirely in spice.

In the interest of providing a balanced meal, I thought maybe I'd make a nice green salad, with a Soylent vinaigrette. Simple stuff. Some baby arugula, baby spinach, Persian cucumbers, goat's cheese. But how am I going to turn this sweet, grainy, vanilla-y liquid into a palatable vinaigrette? I went through my mental rolodex of flavor combinations. It's sweet, so I have to balance it with something sour. Okay, what sour flavor would work with, Christ, vanilla? I ended up macerating some chopped shallots in apple cider vinegar, then adding in the juice of a sour orange. I poured in the Soylent, a bit of salt and pepper, and blitzed everything up with an immersion blender while dripping in olive oil.

I am a good cook, I'm pretty sure. I have worked at it for a long time, reading everything I can, tasting different food, experimenting as often as I can. I have tricks. I know how flavor combinations work. I would challenge anyone to come up with a Soylent vinaigrette as good as the one I made. I would also challenge anyone, in a different way, a meaner and less playful way, to actually eat this salad. I think it is about as good as it can be. It was very bad.

Soylent is a gross, bad product, but at least I felt like I had done what I could to dishonor its reason for being by spending, like, two hours creating a meal out of it.

Of course the joke is mostly on me; the Soylent waffles were flaccid and slightly medicinal tasting, the chicken a little burnt and possessing an overwhelmingly underwhelming flavor. The Soylent vinaigrette was weird and grainy, tasting like nothing so much as valiant failure. Here's to hoping your holiday dinner is better. Also, fuck Soylent.