Why the UK Should Eat More Tempeh

|Team TEMPTÉ
Blocks of tempeh alongside tempeh crisps

We are a nation of committed fermenters. We put Marmite on toast and consider it breakfast. We age cheddar in caves for two years and then argue about whether it's aged enough. We have strong opinions on sourdough, we drown chips in vinegar, and we invented a condiment made from anchovies left to rot in a barrel and then sold it to the world.

So it's a bit odd that we've never really taken to tempeh — a food that is nutty, savoury, faintly funky and made entirely by leaving beans somewhere warm until something interesting happens to them.

On paper, this should have been a natural fit.


We judged soy on the wrong evidence

Here's our theory, and it is a theory rather than a fact.

Soy arrived in Britain properly in the 1970s and 80s, and it arrived as tofu. It turned up in health food shops, unseasoned, next to the carob, at a moment when vegetarian cooking in this country was not at its most persuasive. A generation formed its opinion of soy from a beige cube that nobody had bothered to season.

That opinion stuck. Tempeh then inherited it without ever having done anything to earn it.

Which is unfair, because tempeh isn't tofu. It doesn't need rescuing by a sauce, it doesn't collapse in a pan, and it doesn't taste of nothing. It tastes of roasted nuts and mushrooms and something faintly like a good stock. If you like Marmite, you already like this end of the flavour spectrum — you just haven't been introduced. We've written separately about the differences between tempeh and tofu.


Tempeh is a process, and an ingredient

This is our favourite fact about tempeh, and it took us long enough to learn it.

Tempeh isn't just defined by the soybean. It's defined by what the culture does — bind cooked beans into a firm cake. Point that process at a different bean and it mostly still works. Chickpeas ferment. Black beans ferment. And so, rather well, do fava beans.

Which matters, because the fava is ours. Hodmedod, the Suffolk company that has spent over a decade putting British pulses back on British tables, calls it "Britain's original bean". That isn't marketing licence. Speaking to Countryfile, Hodmedod co-founder Nick Saltmarsh described discovering that favas had been grown here "for thousands of years", back to the Iron Age.

They fix nitrogen in the soil. They cope with our weather. East Anglia is currently full of them, most destined for animal feed or export, because we largely forgot how to eat them.

A British tempeh made from British beans is not a fantasy. It's a fairly short conversation between a bean farmer and someone with a warm room. A handful of people are already doing it, in small quantities, largely unnoticed.

That's a genuinely exciting prospect for a country that talks constantly about food security and homegrown protein and then imports its beans.


It's also cheap

Pulses are among the most affordable sources of protein on supermarket shelves, and fermentation adds time rather than cost. Tempeh is one of the few foods where the interesting version and the economical version are the same version.

Given the last few years, that shouldn't be a footnote.


So what's actually stopping us?

Not supply. That excuse expired a few years ago.

Sainsbury's was first to put tempeh in a British supermarket fridge back in 2019. Since then it's arrived properly: Better Nature is stocked across hundreds of Tesco and Asda stores and around a thousand Lidls, The Tofoo Co sits next to the tofu in larger Tesco and Waitrose branches, and Holland & Barrett carries Biona. If you shop at a decent-sized supermarket, you have almost certainly walked past tempeh. Possibly this week.

And it's moving. When Better Nature reported its numbers in 2024, tempeh was growing around 30% year on year even as the wider meat-free category shrank. Something is clearly working.

So the barrier isn't the shelf. It's which shelf.

Tempeh usually turns up in the meat-substitute section, sandwiched between things engineered to impersonate a sausage. Anyone who's decided the meat-free aisle isn't for them never looks at all. A food that has been eaten on its own terms for two centuries ends up being judged as a stand-in for something else.

And it's still an unfamiliar word. Not a mystery; the recipes exist, every tempeh brand publishes them, there are cooking instructions printed on the back of the pack. The gap isn't instruction. It's that most shoppers have no reason to pick up the block in the first place, because they don't know what it is or what it's for. You don't go looking for recipes for a food you've never decided to buy.

Neither is a problem with the food. Both are problems with the introduction.


The modest proposal

We're not suggesting Britain adopts tempeh as a national food. We'd settle for a fair hearing.

This is a country that eats fermented anchovies on its steak, mould-ripened cheese after dinner and yeast extract at breakfast. The palate is there. The beans are, quite literally, in the ground.

The only thing missing is the introduction, which, as it happens, is roughly what we're here for.


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