The Vegan Butcher Shop, Minneapolis

Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Aubry, Kale Walch (The Herbivorous Butcher)

Does Jimmy Fallon secretly love flavorful veggie alternatives? (#allveganeverything)

"V is for Vegan" teeshirt means gorgeous and compassionate (onoursleeve.com)

Playing with knives in fields of green, brother and sister Kale and Aubry Walch (center)

After a late night at Kindred Kitchen we're at Audio Ruckus warming up for an interview with Rachel Martin for NPR's Weekend Edition! #allveganeverything — with Kale Walch.

Fans eat up the idea of a vegan butcher shop

Jeff Strickler, Star Tribune, Dec. 3, 2014

The creators of a fast-selling line of vegetarian meats are preparing to open a store in Minneapolis.

It might sound like a joke -- a meatless meat market -- but the ones laughing are the people who came up with the idea.

 

One day, when it's the norm, will it still be done with health in mind or just flavor?

 

The brother-and-sister team of Aubry Walch and Kale Walch have just wrapped up a super-successful Kickstarter campaign and are preparing to open a vegan butcher shop, the Herbivorous Butcher, in Minneapolis.

In the process, they’ve also become foodie [and flavor] rock stars. 

• Herbivorous Butcher (@TheHerbivorousB) | Twitter We're Elated! MT @NPRWeekend: first vegan butcher shop in the U.S. opens next year. Confused? Tune in Sun. @TheHerbivorousB @peta @PaulMcCartney. 
• The Vegan Feed : vegan news : all (veganfeed.com) Minneapolis vegan butchers challenge Jimmy Fallon to 'try it' ...Minneapolis vegan butchers and siblings Aubry and Kale Walch were the butt of a...and are preparing to open a vegan butcher shop, the Herbivorous Butcher... 
• Don't Eat Anything with a Face – IQ2 Debates - Intelligence Squared (intelligencesquaredus.org) Dec 4, 2013 ...After many attempts I realized how addicted I was to meat [texture, flavor, hormones, chemicals]..... 6) Not mentioned: herbivores have longer digestive tracts for [fully] processing plant material.... ThinkTwiceLogo; NPR.

“The press we’ve been getting is amazing,” said Kale Walch, who’s been getting requests for interviews from all over the world. “They’ve heard of us in Europe! I still can’t believe that people in the United States have heard of us.”

 

One reason for the interest is that their vegan butcher shop will be the first of its kind anywhere. That and the fact that when people hear about it, their first reaction is to think they’re being punked.

Smokey House Ribs from The Herbivorous Butcher are made of wheat gluten and smoked over hickory chips (Jonathan A. Armstrong/The Herbivorous Butcher).

 
“But then they try it,” Walch said, “and we walk them through the ingredients and explain how it’s the nutritional equivalent of meat, along with the texture and flavor. Then they understand.”

 

What many [new] vegetarians want is something that looks like meat, tastes like meat, acts like meat when you stick it in a burger or put it on a grill -- but that isn’t [dead animal] meat. That’s what the Walches have figured out how to provide. They combine ingredients like [nutritional] yeast, soy, and miso in recipes they’ve spent three years perfecting.

 

They started selling their non-meat meat over the summer at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. Now they’ve moved to the Linden Hills Winter Market, which is held at Sunnyside Gardens, 3723 W. 44th St., Minneapolis. They will be there the next three Sundays, starting at 9:00 am, but their repeat customers know to arrive early because supply doesn’t come close to demand. More

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AUDIO: Siblings Build a Butcher Shop for Meat [flavor, texture]-Loving Vegans

Is compassion and preserving life (non-killing) worth the switch to a veggie live-it?

 

(NPR) Take a moment to imagine platters of andouille sausage, barbecue ribs, and bacon. Now think of all of those dishes without [killing or] meat.

 

It might seem like a contradiction, but brother and sister Kale and Aubry Walch -- yes, Kale -- are opening the first vegan butcher shop next spring in Minneapolis, to be called the Herbivorous Butcher.

They plan to bring their customers all of those delicious meat flavors, minus the [cruelty, killing, chemicals, growth hormones, and carcinogenic] meat.

 

The Soulful Vegan is full of soul and full of life-giving food, vegetus.

 

Recreating the taste without the actual ingredient is a challenge worth tackling, the siblings say. "Meat was a big part of the dinner table, growing up," Kale Walch says.

 

"Oftentimes, we had three or four different meats at our dinner table," his sister agrees. "When I decided to go vegetarian when I was 14, I really wanted to recreate those same [texture and flavor] items. I missed them."

 

Jackfruit: fibrous texture (Maricel E. Presilla/MCT/Landov)

They experimented to replicate the textures and tastes of meat. "We use pinto beans, for example, in our sausages," Kale Walch says. "That gives it a really meaty heft that's unparalleled in the meat-alternative market."

 

They say nutritional yeast gives a savory flavor [what in Asia is called umami] to many of their products. They also use jackfruit, a starchy tree fruit native to Southeast Asia and the national fruit of Bangladesh, that can weigh up to 80 pounds.

The gives foods at the Herbivorous Butcher a fibrous, meat-like texture, Kale Walch says. "The jackfruit can be used in steaks to give it that veiny, fibrous texture that you might be looking for sometimes," he says.
 

After years of developing their recipes and with the help of vegan and vegetarian friends, they began selling at the Minneapolis farmers market. Their menu includes smokey house ribs, pepperoni, deli bologna, chorizo, maple sage breakfast sausage, and teriyaki jerky. More + AUDIO