Sarah puts the yum into vegan cookery

Sarah puts the yum into vegan cookery

27 July 2016

VEGAN entrepreneur Sarah McGreechan reckons she has the seal of approval from what should be her toughest market.

She estimates that nearly three-quarters of those who frequent her travelling stall of plant-based goodies are non-vegans – and plenty of the meat eaters are coming back for more.

The 26 year-old from Portaferry only set up her business in January but can be found most mornings at dawn blitzing up dishes such as hearty black bean burgers, ‘Philly steak’ sandwiches and moreish cashew fudge brownies to meet the demands of her regular customers.

They appear everywhere from farmers’ markets in Comber and Hillsborough to vegan weddings, and Sarah hopes to soon have a more permanent base in Belfast with her own vegan restaurant.

Having travelled the world to the likes of New Zealand, South Africa and Australia after leaving school, combining acting and food blogging with a stack of jobs in the hospitality industry, Sarah recently returned to Northern Ireland.

A vegetarian since the age of nine and a vegan for the past five years, she has been used to living in the likes of London where vegan bakeries, for instance, are not an unusual addition to the high street.

She’s impressed with the growing diversity here, but wants her ‘Sarah’s World Fare’ enterprise to play its part in plugging a gap in the current local market.

“When I lived in Toronto every other café was a vegan café and I was looking at the menus and thinking, I could do this in Belfast,” she says.

“When I came back, I felt the slump. You felt the difference when you were out with your family for a meal and were limited in what you could get. I thought, I am going to do this I am going to start this. I feel everything I have absorbed up to now can be put to use.”

There’s no rabbit food here — Sarah’s aim is to create comfort food that makes you feel good. She is also well aware that “people eat with their eyes”.

“I have a Philly cheese steak recipe, which is traditionally made with steak cheese and onions,” she explains. “This is a traditional dish in Philadelphia but obviously I make it with a home-made vegan meat called seitan [a type of high-protein gluten]. “When you slice into it looks like roast beef and when you bite into it it’s really chewy, it’s really popular. We fry it on the grill with onions and have it with our cheese sauce and chilli.

“The cheese sauce is really healthy. There are a lot of dairy alternatives out there but they are really high in fat, even more so than regular cheese. I use Brewer’s yeast for a natural cheese flavour. It is really high in vitamin B12. I use carrot and potato and turmeric blended with the Brewer’s yeast and it makes the most cheesy sauce. I remember thinking this isn’t going to work, but it’s one of our most popular dishes and we put it on our nachos as well.

“My favourite sauce base is cashew nuts which is used for the cashew relish on the burgers, which is made with tomato puree and pickles.

“I think genuinely most people like to try something a bit different and I think some people are surprised at how much they quite like the food, especially the nachos. “Even some vegans say to me — ‘Are you sure there is no meat in this?’ So far the feedback has been fantastic. People are saying they are not necessarily vegan but they are just trying to eat less meat, or are even on a budget.”

Making it all from her Portaferry kitchen, and supported by her partner and fan of her food, Conor O’Hare, Sarah’s been through a good few food processors in her time. The organisational part of it is now down to a fine art — even to the packing of her market stall into her “tardis” Volkswagen Polo — but it is labour intensive.

“If I’m doing two markets and two catering jobs in the one week I’m pretty much working seven days a week,” she says. “I’m doing all the cooking myself and on market day you are getting up at five in the morning going to bed about 12 at night. It’s a lot of man hours, long days that I didn’t think I was capable of, but I think it’s different when you’re working for yourself.”

When demand suddenly took off at the outset, Sarah admits that she initially got carried away in saying yes too many times.

“Whenever I started my second week doing this I actually fainted in the kitchen,” she says. “It’s never happened to me in my life. I was just doing too much but now I’ve definitely learnt to scale back a bit.

“I do screenwriting too and initially thought I would have more time to do that. That obviously hasn’t exactly happened but I do genuinely love this.”

Sarah had her personal “light switch” moment with regards to eating meat at the tender age of nine — enquiries about two sirloin steaks on her dad’s kitchen counter didn’t provide the answers she wanted.

“I was an overthinker as a kid.” she admits. “When I was in school I remember kids asking me why I didn’t eat meat. I remember being really honest and saying it was because I like animals. I remember a few going vegetarian in my year. I was way more militant as a nine year-old than I am now.”

Sarah’s transition to becoming a vegan aged 21 incorporated concerns she had about the dairy industry.

“Vegans can be put in a box, like they are real militants and scary and hardcore. For me it was a really personal thing. I thought a lot about where food comes from. I think there is a culture now where people don’t pay attention to where their food comes from.

“I am not here to antagonise anyone, I’m just here to give an option to people who choose to eat less meat or less dairy.

“For me when I became a vegan my energy spiked, I had clearer skin and a new lease of life but you can also be a really unhealthy vegan.

“If you are curious about a diet, try it, and your body will tell you everything you need to know.”

She doesn’t really consider herself part of the “clean eating” brigade currently dominating social media but does recognises the interest. She admits, however, that there’s a lot more to it than shiny Instagram photos.

“Its hard if you are coming from a background where you haven’t really been doing any cooking,” she says. “I put the recipes up on my website so people can see how easy it can be but it can be really hard initially.

“Once it becomes your lifestyle, you prepare. I’m the person that if I miss a meal I get really angry.”

Confident that the current vegan craze is not a phase, Sarah says: “I can’t even imagine the next ten years. The pace of change even in the last 18 months has me genuinely staggered.

“We have our biggest ever two weeks coming up with the Sunflower Festival, three days in a row of fresh food week. It will be insane for about a week.

“Hopefully at some point I will look back at this beginning period and think, my word I really started with nothing. I’ve put all own savings into it, it’s the biggest gamble I’ve ever taken. So far its been good and hopefully that will continue.”