Why We Make Snacks From Tempeh

|Team TEMPTÉ
Baked tempeh crisps on a plate

Most savoury snacks are built the same way. Take something starchy and fairly neutral, fry it, then rescue it with seasoning. It works. It's why the aisle is full of them.

We wanted to start somewhere else, with an ingredient worth tasting in the first place.

 

Tempeh can hold its own

Tempeh is a block of fermented whole soybeans, and the useful thing about it is that it already tastes of something. Nutty, savoury, faintly earthy from the fermentation. When it's eaten alone, it's still interesting.

That matters more than it sounds. If your base ingredient tastes of very little, seasoning stops being a flavour and starts being a fix. You end up eating the coating.

Tempeh is also dense and low in water, which is why it browns and crisps so readily. It was, in hindsight, an obvious candidate for a snack. It just hadn't been treated as one very often.

 

Why we bake rather than deep-fry

Most tempeh crisps and tempeh savoury snacks are deep-fried, very often (and traditionally so) in palm oil. It's cheap, it's stable at high temperatures and it gives a consistent result at scale. There are good operational reasons it dominates.

There are also reasons to avoid it. Palm oil is high in saturated fat, and it's almost completely neutral in flavour — which is a lot of nothing to put between you and the ingredient you're meant to be tasting. Deep-frying doesn't just cook a snack, it coats it.

So we set out to do it differently. We bake ours instead.

Partly that's a texture decision. Baking gives a firmer, drier snap rather than the light, oily crispness of a fried crisp — closer to a cracker than a crisp, and it suits tempeh's density. Partly it's about what ends up in the bag: baked snacks can carry considerably less oil, and we'd rather the flavour came from the bean and the seasoning than from the fat it was cooked in.

It's slower and it's harder to get right. It also means the tempeh still tastes like tempeh at the end of it, which was the whole point.

 

We'd rather you tasted the tempeh

Our first flavour is roasted garlic, and the brief we gave ourselves was that you should be able to tell what's underneath it.

That's a genuinely annoying constraint to work with. A heavier seasoning would be easier and it would probably test well. But it would also make the tempeh interchangeable with anything else you could have baked instead, and at that point there's not much reason to use it.

So the seasoning sits alongside the fermented, nutty base rather than on top of it. If you've eaten tempeh before, you'll recognise the subtle tempeh flavour upon each bite. If you haven't, this is a reasonable introduction to what it actually tastes like.

 

What that means when you eat it

Tempeh is made from the whole soybean, so nothing gets strained out on the way; unlike tofu, which is made from soy milk with the pulp removed. Baking rather than frying keeps that intact rather than submerging it in oil.

The practical upshot is a snack based on tempeh can be substantial. It can be dense and firm rather than puffed full of air, with a texture that actually gives you something to bite into, which is more than we could say for most of what we were reaching for before we started.

It also behaves well outside the bag. It holds up to a dip without collapsing, it sits happily on a cheese board, and it's sturdy enough to travel — which is roughly where this whole idea started, on a long train journey with nothing decent to eat.

 

The short version

We didn't set out to make a tempeh company. We set out to make a snack we'd keep going back to, with tempeh as our key ingredient.

Baked, not fried. Made from whole fermented beans. Seasoned enough to be worth eating and not so much that you lose what's underneath.

That's most of what we're doing.

 

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