Plant-Based Alternatives in Asian Cuisine

Published on: AsianFoodsDaily.com | Category: Blog | Reading Time: ~15 minutes

At a Glance

Plant-based alternatives are not new to Asian cuisine — they are foundational to it. Tofu has been made in China since at least the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). Seitan (wheat gluten) was developed by Mahāyāna Buddhist monks in sixth-century China as a deliberate meat substitute. Tempeh has been fermented in Java, Indonesia, for at least four to five centuries. Long before Western food technology began engineering plant-based burgers, Asian culinary traditions had already built a comprehensive, culturally embedded ecosystem of meat alternatives rooted in Buddhist ethics, agricultural resourcefulness, and exceptional flavour engineering. Today, that tradition is being extended by a new generation of Asian food-tech companies — OmniFoods, Green Monday, Unlimeat — designing products for Asian palates that the global plant-based market largely ignored. The Asia-Pacific plant-based meat market was valued at USD 1.37 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% through 2030.

Introduction: The Tradition That Predates the Trend

When plant-based eating became a global conversation in the late 2010s, most of the media coverage framed it as a Western innovation — Impossible Burgers, Beyond Meat patties, Silicon Valley food-tech startups engineering the perfect heme molecule. What that framing missed, almost entirely, was that Asia had been solving the same problem for two millennia, and had done so with considerably more elegance.

The plant-based alternatives that now fill Western supermarket shelves — tofu, tempeh, edamame, seitan — are not recent inventions repatriated to Asia. They originated there, refined over centuries in Buddhist monasteries, Javanese villages, and Chinese market kitchens. The monk who simmered wheat gluten in soy-seasoned broth in a Tang Dynasty temple kitchen was not performing an ancient version of food tech. He was cooking dinner. The Indonesian farmer who fermented soybeans wrapped in banana leaves was not making a meat substitute. He was making protein from what was available and affordable.

This article examines plant-based alternatives in Asian cuisine with the depth they deserve — from their deep historical roots, through the specific culinary and nutritional properties that make each one distinct, to the contemporary food-tech wave building on that foundation across the Asia-Pacific region. It also addresses a distinction that much writing on this topic collapses: the difference between ingredients that are plant-based by origin versus ingredients that function as deliberate meat analogues. Both exist in Asian cooking. They are not the same thing.

One caveat worth making explicit: the West/Asia framing used here is analytically useful but historically incomplete. Mutual influence runs in both directions. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat — Western companies — accelerated global investment in plant-based food technology, including funding that reached Asian startups. Pea protein isolate technology central to OmniFoods’s formulation was developed largely in Western food science labs. Macrobiotic culture — which popularised tofu and tempeh in Western health food markets from the 1960s onward — was itself a Japanese export, and that Western adoption created the retail infrastructure through which Asian ingredients became globally available. The argument that Asia built plant-based cooking first is historically true. The argument that Asian and Western plant-based development have been entirely separate is not.

The Buddhist Foundation: Why Asia Built Plant-Based Alternatives

Mahāyāna Buddhism and the Vegetarian Imperative

The single most important driver of plant-based food innovation in East and Southeast Asia was not nutrition science or environmental consciousness. It was Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine, specifically the prohibition on taking animal life.

Mahāyāna Buddhism — the dominant form practised across China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and much of Southeast Asia — interprets ahimsa (non-harm) as extending to dietary practice. Monastic communities following strict interpretation ate no meat, fish, or in some traditions no eggs or pungent aromatics (wuxin, the five strong-flavoured roots: onion, garlic, leek, chives, and asafoetida). This was not occasional abstinence. It was a permanent dietary framework covering every meal in every monastery, across centuries.

The culinary response to this constraint was extraordinary. Buddhist temple kitchens — particularly in China and subsequently in Japan and Korea — became centres of plant-based food innovation, developing techniques for transforming humble ingredients into preparations of remarkable sophistication. The goal, especially in Chinese Buddhist cooking, was sometimes explicitly to replicate the sensory experience of meat: the chew, the density, the savoury umami depth. This produced what food historians call “mock meats” or su cai (素菜, vegetarian dishes) — a tradition that predates the modern plant-based industry by at least a thousand years.

The Indian Distinction

India’s vegetarian tradition operates on different logic and is worth distinguishing. In the Hindu and Jain vegetarian traditions of the subcontinent, meat was never a cultural reference point for a substantial portion of the population — meat was simply not part of the diet at all, making mock meats unnecessary and largely absent from the tradition. As food writer Chitra Agrawal observes, for many Indian vegetarians, a meat substitute would not register as a concept because meat was never a baseline to substitute. The result is a rich plant-based tradition — lentils, legumes, paneer, yoghurt, tofu in some regional cuisines — without the elaborate meat-mimicry that characterises Chinese Buddhist cooking. When examining plant-based alternatives in Asian cuisine, these two traditions — the Chinese mock-meat tradition and the Indian legume-and-dairy tradition — represent distinct approaches that should not be collapsed into a single category.

The Three Generations of Asian Plant-Based Proteins

Food researchers studying this history have identified three generational phases of plant-based protein development in Asia, each building on the last.

First Generation: The Foundational Three

Tofu (dòufu, 豆腐) — The oldest and most widely distributed Asian plant-based protein. Tofu is made by coagulating soy milk and pressing the resulting curds into blocks, a process that closely parallels cheesemaking. Its origins are in Han Dynasty China, though popular records from the tenth century refer to tofu as “small mutton” — explicit acknowledgement of its use as a meat analogue even at that early date. By the Tang and Song Dynasties it was a monastic staple, and by the seventeenth century it had spread to Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and much of Southeast Asia.

A 100g serving of firm tofu delivers approximately 8–10g of protein, 4–5g of fat, and 80–90 calories — a relatively low-calorie, moderate-protein profile that explains its role as a flavour vehicle rather than a protein powerhouse. Notably, tofu packed in calcium-sulphate solution (the most common commercial format) also provides a meaningful calcium contribution — roughly 200–350mg per 100g depending on preparation, comparable to dairy milk. Soy protein is a complete protein, containing all nine essential amino acids, which distinguishes it from most plant proteins.

The universe of tofu is wider than most Western cooks appreciate. Silken tofu (kinugoshi dofu in Japanese) has a custard-like texture suited to soups, desserts, and cold preparations. Firm and extra-firm tofu hold shape under heat for stir-frying and braising. Dou gan (干豆腐, dry tofu) has had most of its water pressed out, producing a dense, almost meaty chew. Fried tofu — puffy, sponge-like, excellent at absorbing sauces — is a staple in Korean sundubu jjigae (soft tofu stew) variations and throughout Southeast Asian cooking. Fermented tofu (furu, 腐乳) introduces a pungent, creamy complexity used as a condiment. Each form behaves differently in cooking and serves different culinary functions.

Tempeh — Indonesia’s contribution to the world’s plant-based pantry, and arguably the most nutritionally complete of the three. Tempeh is made by fermenting whole cooked soybeans with Rhizopus oligosporus, a mold that binds the beans into a dense cake and transforms their nutritional profile in the process. Fermentation breaks down phytic acid (which inhibits mineral absorption), increases bioavailable protein, produces B vitamins, and introduces probiotic compounds. The result is higher in protein (approximately 31g per cup) and fibre than tofu, with a nutty, earthy flavour and a texture that holds up to grilling, slicing, and aggressive seasoning far better than tofu does.

Tempeh originated in Central Java, likely in the seventeenth century, in a context of agricultural resourcefulness: fermenting soybeans in tropical heat was a practical preservation technique as much as a culinary innovation. Dutch colonisers encountered it and brought it to the Netherlands in the early twentieth century; it reached Western health food culture in the 1970s. In Java and across Indonesia it has been a daily staple for centuries — eaten fried, in curries, in sambal, and as a protein component of rice-and-vegetable meals that make no claim to be meat alternatives at all.

Nutritionally, tempeh is the most protein-dense of the three foundational Asian plant-based proteins: approximately 19–20g of protein per 100g of raw tempeh (versus 8–10g for firm tofu), with around 11g of fat, 9g of carbohydrate, and 193 calories per 100g. Crucially, it contains the whole soybean — unextracted — which means higher fibre content (approximately 5–7g per 100g) than tofu, and the fermentation process increases the bioavailability of minerals including zinc and iron by breaking down phytic acid, the anti-nutritional compound that limits mineral absorption in unfermented legumes. For comparison, 100g of chicken breast provides roughly 31g of protein at 165 calories — tempeh is not calorie-for-calorie equivalent to meat protein, but it is nutritionally complete and fermentation-enhanced in ways that most animal proteins are not.

Seitan (mianjin, 麵筋, “wheat gluten”) — The most meat-like in texture of the three, and the one most explicitly developed as a meat analogue. Seitan is made by washing wheat flour dough under running water until the starch dissolves away, leaving behind an elastic, protein-dense gluten mass that is then simmered in broth. The result has a dense, chewy texture that genuinely resembles the fibrous structure of meat — more convincingly than tofu or tempeh for most preparations. In Mandarin, mianjin translates literally as “wheat meat,” and the word seitan itself was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, the founder of the macrobiotic diet, for a food that had been made in China since the sixth century CE.

In Buddhist temple cuisine, seitan has been shaped and flavoured to resemble specific meats for over a millennium. The classic Chinese cookery book Suiyuan Shidan (隨園食單) by Qing Dynasty poet Yuan Mei describes seitan textured to emulate goose. The fourteenth-century novel Journey to the West references wheat gluten multiple times. In contemporary Chinese Buddhist restaurants and throughout Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore’s vegetarian restaurant scene, seitan-based mock duck, mock char siu, mock roast pork, and mock abalone are made with a sophistication that reflects this centuries-long refinement.

Second Generation: Mock Meats and Elaboration

From around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Chinese food producers began using tofu, seitan, and other plant ingredients as raw materials for more elaborate meat analogues — mock eel, mock sausage, mock shrimp — that replicated specific meats rather than providing generic protein. By the nineteenth century, these preparations had spread across China, Japan, Indonesia, and the broader East and Southeast Asian region. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong selling elaborate mock meat dishes — including mock Peking duck made entirely from tofu skin and seitan — represent the continuation of this second-generation tradition, now several hundred years old.

Third Generation: Asian Food Tech

The current generation of Asian plant-based companies is building on this foundation with modern food science: pea protein isolates, high-moisture extrusion technology, and precision flavour engineering designed specifically for Asian culinary applications rather than the burger-focused Western market. The Asia-Pacific plant-based meat market reached USD 1.37 billion in 2023, with a projected CAGR of 19.7% through 2030 (Grand View Research). Market dynamics vary significantly by country, and those differences reveal how the tradition shapes the technology.

China (31.2% of Asia-Pacific market in 2023): China is the region’s dominant market by volume, and its plant-based sector is shaped by two competing forces. Domestically, Buddhist vegetarian restaurant culture — the su cai (素菜) tradition — has sustained demand for mock meats for centuries, providing a culturally receptive consumer base for modern analogues. Internationally, companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat entered China through partnerships with KFC, Starbucks, and Taco Bell, creating premium-positioned Western-format products that sit awkwardly alongside the far cheaper and more culturally embedded Buddhist mock meat available at local vegetarian restaurants. The tension is instructive: Chinese consumers who want plant-based food for cultural or religious reasons already have an established, affordable ecosystem. The growth market is the younger urban flexitarian who wants plant-based eating as a health and sustainability choice, and for them the Western burger format competes with Chinese-native brands like Zhenmeat and Starfield that produce dumplings, hotpot proteins, and luncheon meat alternatives explicitly designed for Chinese cooking formats.

India (fastest-growing market, projected 11.09% CAGR to 2030): India’s market is distinct from every other Asian market because it begins from a different baseline. With an estimated 20–39% of the population identifying as vegetarian (depending on survey methodology and regional variation), India is the world’s largest vegetarian population by absolute numbers. The plant-based “alternative” market in India is therefore less about replacing meat for meat-eaters and more about upgrading the nutritional and textural quality of existing vegetarian protein sources, and providing plant-based options that meet the flavour profiles of Indian cooking — high spice, high aromatics, preparations suited to curry, tandoor, and dry fry. GoodDot (Udaipur, Rajasthan) produces plant-based keema, chunks, and biryani-ready protein specifically formulated for Indian spice intensities. Blue Tribe Foods targets the urban flexitarian with chicken and fish analogues designed for Indian home cooking. EVO Foods focuses on egg analogues — a significant gap in a market where eggs are a primary non-vegetarian protein for millions of semi-vegetarian households. The Indian market will not be won by adapting Western burger formats; it will be won by products that function in dal makhani, butter chicken (plant-based), and tandoori preparations.

Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand): Southeast Asia presents the most complex picture, because tempeh is not a plant-based alternative in this region — it is simply food. Indonesia, the world’s largest tempeh-producing nation, does not frame tempeh consumption as a dietary choice. The plant-based growth market here is in premium processed analogues targeting middle-class urban consumers for whom conventional tempeh is associated with budget eating. Green Monday (Hong Kong) has been most successful with OmniMeat’s luncheon meat analogue — the Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest consumer of canned luncheon meat, and a plant-based version that functions in char siu bao, congee, and fried rice format is a more culturally targeted product than any burger. In Singapore, the government’s Singapore Food Agency has actively supported plant-based food development as part of its food security strategy, with Singapore-based companies including Next Gen Foods (TiNDLE chicken, using sunflower oil and methylcellulose for a realistic sear) operating in a regulatory environment explicitly designed to accelerate the sector.

Japan and South Korea: Japan’s market is shaped by shojin ryori tradition and a strong existing infrastructure for fermented soy products (natto, miso, various tofu formats), but Buddhist dietary practice has lost cultural centrality for most of the population, and flexitarianism as a concept is less developed than in China or South Korea. The growth is primarily in premium food service: ramen chain Ippudo’s all-vegan tonkotsu ramen, Muji’s plant-based ready meals, and Mos Burger’s plant-based burger are all premium-positioned. South Korea, by contrast, has the most dynamic startup ecosystem in the region for plant-based innovation, shaped partly by Korea’s sophisticated fermentation infrastructure (doenjang, ganjang, gochujang — all fermented soy or chilli bases) that provides natural advantage in producing umami-forward plant-based products. Unlimeat’s grain-based Korean barbecue cuts and mandu use extrusion technology alongside fermentation approaches directly analogous to tempeh’s Rhizopus fermentation, adapted for Korean flavour profiles.

Case Study: From Buddhist Mock Char Siu to OmniMeat Luncheon — One Lineage

The abstract claim that modern Asian food tech builds on ancient tradition is best understood through a single concrete lineage. Consider the trajectory from Chinese Buddhist mock char siu to OmniFoods’s plant-based luncheon meat — a line that runs from sixth-century monastery kitchens to a McDonald’s Hong Kong partnership in 2021.

Step 1 — The monastic original. Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooks developed mock char siu (叉燒) — the sweet, red-glazed roast pork that is one of Cantonese cooking’s most beloved preparations — using seitan as the structural base, coated in a sauce of hoisin, fermented red tofu (nanru, 南乳), soy, and sugar that produced the characteristic colour, glaze, and flavour profile without animal protein. The technique worked because seitan’s dense, fibrous texture absorbed the marinade at depth, and the Maillard reaction on the exterior produced the caramelised crust. This was not approximation — Chinese Buddhist mock char siu was and remains a sophisticated culinary preparation served in dedicated vegetarian restaurants across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Step 2 — The cultural extension. Luncheon meat (lo-mah or canned spam-style pork) became a staple of Hong Kong and broader Southeast Asian pantries through twentieth-century trade and colonial influence. It appears in instant noodles, fried rice, congee, and musubi-style snacks. The cultural attachment to luncheon meat’s specific flavour and texture profile — salty, yielding, slightly fatty — creates a direct parallel to what Buddhist mock char siu was doing centuries earlier: satisfying a culturally embedded craving for a specific pork preparation without the pork.

Step 3 — The engineering translation. OmniFoods spent two years formulating OmniMeat Luncheon to replicate that profile using pea protein (structure), non-GMO soy (soy protein for binding and familiar flavour register), shiitake mushroom powder (glutamate-driven umami, directly analogous to the fermented bean components of the Buddhist mock char siu sauce), rice (texture modifier), and beetroot (natural colour, replacing the red of nanru in the original). The product is cholesterol-free, 86% lower in saturated fat than conventional luncheon meat, and has 260% more calcium and 127% more iron per serving.

The shiitake is the continuity. Buddhist temple kitchens understood that dried shiitake’s glutamate content replicated the umami depth of meat-based preparations. OmniFoods’s food scientists arrived at the same solution from a biochemical direction. The ingredient, the function, and the cultural application are all inherited — the engineering is new, but it is solving a problem that Asian plant-based cooking had already identified and partially solved a thousand years earlier.

Key Ingredients and How They Function in Asian Cooking

Tofu: The Versatile Canvas

Tofu’s defining characteristic — the one that makes it both easy and challenging to cook well — is its near-flavourlessness. It absorbs what surrounds it rather than asserting its own character, which makes it a remarkable vehicle for the bold, layered flavour profiles of Asian cooking. A well-made mapo tofu (麻婆豆腐) uses silken or medium-firm tofu precisely because it carries the doubanjiang (fermented broad bean and chilli paste), Sichuan peppercorn, and fermented black bean sauce into every mouthful — see our silken tofu in mapo tofu guide for the full technique. The tofu is not background — it is the delivery mechanism.

Key technique: moisture management. Silken tofu for soups and cold dishes; medium-firm for Korean jjigae and Thai tom yum; firm pressed tofu for stir-fries and pan-frying; extra-firm or dry tofu (dou gan) for preparations requiring the tofu to hold distinct shape and develop a crust.

Tempeh: Flavour First

Unlike tofu, tempeh brings its own character — nutty, earthy, with a slight fermented tang that becomes richer when fried. In Indonesian and Malaysian cooking, tempeh is not a meat substitute in any psychological sense. It is simply a protein with a specific flavour profile, treated as such. Tempe goreng (fried tempeh) is eaten alongside rice and vegetables as a complete meal component. Tempe bacem — tempeh braised in sweet soy, coriander, and galangal — is a Javanese dish of considerable sophistication that works entirely because of tempeh’s own flavour, not in spite of it.

For plant-based cooking outside Indonesia, tempeh’s structural advantage is its ability to be sliced thin and pan-fried until crisp, crumbled into bolognese-style preparations, or marinated and grilled as a substantial centrepiece protein. Our sweet soy tempeh stir-fry demonstrates this approach directly — the Javanese tempe bacem technique translated for the home kitchen. Its fermentation makes it more digestible than tofu for many people, and its higher fibre content makes it more satiating gram-for-gram.

Seitan: The Texture Specialist

Seitan is the right choice when texture is the primary objective — when the goal is a preparation that genuinely approximates the chew, density, and fibrous pull of meat. This makes it particularly effective in long braises, in preparations where slicing is important (mock Peking duck, mock char siu), and in any application where tofu’s softness would be a liability.

The limitation is gluten intolerance and coeliac disease, which make seitan entirely off-limits for a meaningful minority. Nutritionally, seitan is the highest-protein of the three: approximately 25g of protein per 100g with only around 2g of fat and 140–170 calories — a protein-to-calorie ratio that genuinely rivals lean meat (chicken breast: ~31g protein, 165 calories per 100g). The trade-off is that wheat gluten is not a complete protein — it is low in lysine — so seitan works best in diets that include complementary lysine sources such as legumes, tofu, or tempeh alongside it.

Jackfruit: The Structural Mimic

Young green jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) has become one of the most widely used plant-based meat alternatives globally in the past decade, and it is worth noting that jackfruit has been eaten in South and Southeast Asia for centuries — not primarily as a meat substitute, but as a vegetable in its own right. In Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Sri Lanka, jackfruit curries are traditional preparations; in Thailand and Vietnam, young jackfruit is used in salads and stir-fries.

What makes jackfruit function as a meat analogue is purely structural: its unripe flesh, when cooked and shredded, produces fibrous strands that closely resemble pulled pork or chicken in visual presentation and mouthfeel. It is low in protein — approximately 1.7–2.5g per 100g of raw young jackfruit, compared to 20–31g for the animal proteins it visually substitutes — so it functions as a texture component rather than a nutritional meat replacement. A jackfruit-based dish served without an additional protein source (legumes, tofu, tempeh) is broadly equivalent to eating a vegetable, not a protein meal. Its effectiveness in the plant-based context relies on bold seasoning, as jackfruit has almost no flavour of its own.

Mushrooms and Umami Engineering

No discussion of plant-based alternatives in Asian cuisine is complete without addressing mushrooms — specifically their role as natural umami generators rather than mere meat-texture substitutes.

Glutamic acid is the amino acid responsible for the savoury, mouth-coating quality of umami. It occurs in high concentrations in dried shiitake (Lentinula edodes), king oyster (Pleurotus eryngii), and lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus) mushrooms. Dried shiitake in particular releases glutamic acid when rehydrated and cooked, producing a deep, savoury broth that rivals meat stock. This is why dashi made from kombu and dried shiitake is the foundation of Japanese shojin ryori vegetarian cooking — it replaces the umami function of fish-based dashi without resembling fish. Our shiitake and kombu ramen broth builds this exact scaffold from scratch, showing how the same glutamate principle that sustained Buddhist monastery kitchens for centuries works in a home bowl of ramen.

King oyster mushrooms, when scored and roasted or pan-seared, develop a dense, chewy texture and a natural flavour that makes them one of the most convincing structural meat analogues without any processing at all. OmniFoods’s 2024 Lion’s Mane Mushroom Steak product extends this principle with a whole-ingredient approach.

The broader point is that Asian plant-based cooking has always used fermented and aged ingredients — miso, doenjang (Korean fermented soybean paste), doubanjiang, soy sauce, fermented black beans — as umami scaffolding, solving the flavour-depth problem that challenges most Western plant-based cooking long before glutamate was understood biochemically.

Regional Traditions Worth Knowing

Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cuisine (su cai, 素菜): The most elaborately developed tradition of mock meats in the world, with over a thousand years of refinement. Dishes like mock Peking duck, mock abalone, and mock char siu are made using tofu skin (yuba, 湯葉), seitan, and various fermented soy products with a sophistication that reflects genuine culinary artistry rather than nutritional compromise.

Japanese shojin ryori (精進料理): Temple cuisine developed in Zen Buddhist monasteries, characterised by restraint, seasonal ingredients, and an emphasis on the inherent qualities of ingredients rather than meat mimicry. Shojin ryori uses tofu, tofu skin, mountain vegetables (sansai), and fermented grain-based stocks to build flavour without mock meat aspiration. It is arguably more sophisticated than mock meat traditions precisely because it makes no concession to the memory of animal protein.

Indonesian tempe culture: Indonesia’s tempeh tradition extends far beyond any single preparation. Tempeh is eaten daily across Java, Bali, and much of the archipelago, in preparations ranging from fried with sambal to braised in coconut milk, crumbled into soups, or sliced thinly and used in sandwiches. The Javanese understanding of tempeh as a complete food — not a substitute for anything, but a protein with its own complete culinary identity — is a model for how plant-based alternatives function best.

Indian dal and legume tradition: India’s plant-based protein system is built not on processed analogues but on lentils (dal), chickpeas (chana), kidney beans (rajma), and black-eyed peas — prepared in a repertoire of curry, stew, and dry preparations of enormous complexity. This tradition is nutritionally sophisticated in its management of complementary proteins (pairing legumes with rice or flatbreads to achieve complete amino acid profiles) without any reference to meat as a culinary model. Specific dishes make this concrete: our dal makhani recipe — black lentils slow-cooked with butter and cream — achieves a richness that rivals any braised meat preparation through fat content, spice layering, and long cooking time alone. Chana masala uses the chickpea’s natural meaty density to produce a preparation that satisfies the same hunger as a meat curry. Rajma chawal (kidney beans and rice) is a complete protein meal that has sustained northern Indian families for generations without any animal protein required.

Contemporary Indian companies building on this foundation include GoodDot (Udaipur), which produces plant-based keema and chunk proteins formulated specifically for the spice intensities of Indian cooking — a product that would dissolve into irrelevance in a mild stir-fry but functions correctly in keema pav and biryani formats. Blue Tribe Foods and EVO Foods (plant-based egg analogue) represent the urban Indian flexitarian market’s rapid professionalisation. What distinguishes the Indian approach: these companies are not replacing meat with plants in a culture that eats meat. They are improving the nutritional and textural sophistication of a vegetarian tradition that already exists and already works.

Korean temple food (sachal eumsik, 사찰음식): Korean Buddhist temple cuisine uses no meat, no fish, and in strict interpretation no pungent aromatics — the same wuxin restrictions as Chinese Buddhism. The result is a tradition of extraordinary vegetable and fermented ingredient work: elaborate preparations of namul (seasoned blanched vegetables), fermented doenjang and ganjang (soy sauces), tofu, and root vegetables that communicate the full range of Korean flavour profiles without any protein from animals. A temple-style doenjang jjigae (fermented soybean paste stew with tofu and vegetables) achieves its depth entirely through the glutamate richness of aged doenjang — a fermentation product with two thousand years of Korean development behind it. UNESCO inscribed Korean temple food as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013, recognising it as a living culinary tradition of genuine heritage significance.

Contemporary Korean plant-based companies extend this fermentation advantage directly into modern product development. Unlimeat uses grain fermentation and extrusion technology that echoes Rhizopus-based tempeh fermentation but applies Korean flavour profiles — producing plant-based bulgogi cuts, mandu (dumplings), and galbi-style barbecue proteins that function correctly in ssam (lettuce wrap) and jeon (Korean pancake) formats that a Western burger analogue could never serve. The PlantEat and Armored Fresh (plant-based Korean cheese) represent the broader Korean food-tech ecosystem that is now one of Asia’s most active.

Common Questions

What is the best plant-based substitute for fish sauce in Asian cooking?

Fish sauce’s flavour profile — salty, funky, deeply umami — comes from fermentation-derived glutamate and inosinate compounds. The closest plant-based equivalents are light soy sauce (Thai or Vietnamese-style thin soy rather than heavy Chinese dark soy), coconut aminos (lower sodium, slightly sweeter), and purpose-formulated vegan fish sauce products built on seaweed, fermented mushroom, or soy bases. A practical approximation: light soy sauce with a small piece of nori steeped in warm water and a squeeze of lime covers the salt-acid-umami triangle adequately for most cooking applications.

What is shojin ryori, and how does it differ from Chinese Buddhist mock-meat cooking?

Shojin ryori (精進料理) is Japanese Zen Buddhist temple cuisine that works entirely within the inherent qualities of its ingredients — tofu, tofu skin (yuba), mountain vegetables (sansai), sesame, fermented grains — without attempting to replicate meat. This distinguishes it sharply from the Chinese Buddhist su cai tradition, which has spent over a thousand years engineering seitan, tofu skin, and fermented soy products to specifically resemble duck, char siu, abalone, and pork. Both are plant-based; they represent opposite philosophical approaches. Shojin ryori asks what plant ingredients can be on their own terms. Chinese Buddhist cooking asks what they can be made to resemble.

Why does Asian plant-based cooking rarely use nutritional yeast?

Because it never needed to. Nutritional yeast became a staple of Western plant-based cooking as a processed solution to the umami-depth problem — providing the cheesy, savoury richness that dairy and meat had previously supplied. Asian plant-based cooking had already solved that problem through centuries of fermentation: miso, doenjang, doubanjiang, soy sauce, fermented black beans, and dried shiitake all generate the same glutamate-driven umami depth that nutritional yeast delivers, using traditional ingredients with far longer culinary histories. Nutritional yeast is a workaround for a tradition that lacks fermented umami infrastructure. Most Asian plant-based cooking traditions have that infrastructure built in.

Can tempeh be made from something other than soybeans?

Yes, though soybean tempeh remains by far the most common form in its Javanese home tradition. Fermentation with Rhizopus oligosporus works with most legumes and some grains: black bean tempeh, chickpea tempeh, lentil tempeh, and mixed-grain tempeh all exist and are produced commercially, primarily by Western artisan producers experimenting with the format. In Indonesia, peanut-based oncom (fermented with Neurospora mold rather than Rhizopus) is a close Javanese relative that predates modern tempeh experimentation. The practical consideration: different legumes produce different textures and flavour profiles under fermentation, and most non-soy tempeh variants are less dense and less protein-rich than the soybean original. The tradition is Javanese and soy-centric; the experimentation is largely Western.

Bringing Plant-Based Asian Cooking Into Your Kitchen

Understanding the tradition behind these ingredients changes how you approach them. Tofu is not a protein replacement that falls short of meat — it is a flavour-delivery system with its own culinary logic. Tempeh is not a health food compromise — it is a fermented protein with a complete flavour identity. Seitan is not a novelty — it is a thousand-year-old kitchen technology.

Two preparations that demonstrate these principles clearly: our Mapo Tofu recipe shows exactly how silken tofu functions as a carrier for the ferociously complex doubanjiang-Sichuan peppercorn-fermented black bean sauce that surrounds it — the tofu does not compete with those flavours but amplifies them through contrast. Every plant-based principle discussed in this article is visible in that single dish.

For those exploring tempeh’s culinary identity on its own terms, our Japanese-style tempeh stir-fry demonstrates the bold aromatics and sweet soy glaze approach that works with tempeh’s fermented nuttiness rather than masking it. And for the most concentrated expression of mushroom umami in Asian cooking, the mushroom ramen broth technique covered in our Mushroom Ramen recipe uses exactly the same kombu-and-shiitake scaffold discussed above — now applied to a full ramen bowl any home cook can build.

Conclusion: The Tradition Has Always Been Here

The global conversation about plant-based eating has spent considerable energy marvelling at food-tech innovation while overlooking a two-thousand-year tradition that already answered most of the questions being asked. Asia did not need to invent plant-based eating. It needed to be recognised for having practised it continuously, at scale, across some of the world’s most sophisticated culinary cultures.

Tofu, tempeh, seitan, jackfruit, mushrooms, and the elaborate mock-meat traditions of Chinese Buddhist cooking are not stepping stones toward some future plant-based ideal. They are the result of centuries of accumulated culinary intelligence applied to the problem of eating well without animal protein. The new generation of Asian food-tech companies building on this foundation — OmniFoods, Unlimeat, and others — understand this: their products work not because they copy Western models but because they speak to flavour profiles, cooking formats, and cultural contexts that the tradition created.

The plant-based future in Asia is being built on the plant-based past. That past is extraordinary.

Article written for AsianFoodsDaily.com. All historical and cultural information is provided for general educational purposes. ++View Disclaimer++.