Thomas Chalk and Cath Kane, our very own foodie couple, headed down to Sheaf Street’s latest pop-up Mor Mor at the weekend to sample the vegan menu that is being served up during January 2019.
It’s a little over 12 months since Leeds-born Hugo Monypenny decided to quit his day job and set up MorMor, after finding a gap in the North’s street food scene. Regular attendance at numerous street food markets highlighted the need for a healthier option. Hugo found his inspiration from the East, with the creation of contemporary Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean dishes.
MorMor’s Veganuary menu this month centres mostly on the Middle East and North Africa. With small dishes at £4-£5 and larger ones at £6-£7, the pricing invites mixing and matching. We went for the four larger dishes – two of them flatbreads, which can be bought together for a tenner, and we probably wouldn’t have gone home hungry if we’d just stuck to those.
The first plate we tried was aubergine with courgette and freekeh salad and dukkah (freekeh is a wheat grain not a million miles from bulgar, dukkah a nutty spice mix originally from Egypt). The aubergine was cooked to the point of velvety softness (as it should be – undercooked aubergine is both unappetising and a wasted opportunity), with smokiness from charring on the grill. The freekeh and vegetables that accompanied offset it with a satisfying mix of textures, bright with acidity and fresh with herbs. The warm spices and chilli heat played a supporting role rather than dominating.
The flatbreads – one with jackfruit and chickpea shawarma, one with super seed and dukkah falafels – similarly offered an exciting interplay of tastes and textures. Jackfruit is surely by now a vegan food cliché, but by not relying too heavily on it for the flatbread, MorMor’s worked well as just one of many equal but different parts. The hummus that accompanied the jackfruit was arguably the standout of these, a loose, zingy, lemon-heavy sauce that was a world away from the cloying pastes of so many supermarkets. The falafels, with their added seeds and dukkah, had a texture that edged towards nut roast rather than the more traditional mealy quality, and while on their own this might have been a little pastier than would perhaps be ideal, it was set off very well by the pickled cabbage, thin slices of beetroot and muhammara sauce (a tangy paste of red peppers and walnuts). As with the aubergine, spices played an important but not dominant role.
Butternut squash, red pepper and chickpea tagine was, for us, the least exciting of our chosen dishes. While the spicing brought a complex enough flavour, it was one complex flavour that ran through the whole dish; the aubergine and flatbreads managed to make every mouthful seem just a little different from every other with the elements being neither jarring nor unbalanced. Even the inclusion of some elements in more than one dish – the dukkah, the pickled cabbage that featured on both flatbreads – didn’t leave us with a sense of having eaten the same thing over and over. As one dish amongst several, though, the tagine did provide a contrast to its more salad-heavy counterparts, with the soft, starchy squash; but it was also the one we felt we would most easily have made for ourselves at home.
MorMor’s focus on healthy eating is not at the expense of good, tasty food (the two are not at all incompatible, of course). Even a fairly standard falafel wrap with bog-standard hummus and undressed salad with too much iceberg lettuce can be an okay bite to eat, but with a bit of care it can, as here, be elevated to something that can banish the winter’s cold and the January gloom of trying to stick to a healthy eating resolution.
Whilst MorMor’s focus is predominately on vegan and vegetarian food, they do serve up dishes for carnivores, depending on their audience. Catch Hugo and his team at various events across Leeds in the next few months, including the Wardrobe’s Veganuary Market on Saturday 19th January 2019, and another pop up at Chapel Allerton’s Seven Arts in March 2019.
MorMor will be serving up their vegan menu every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 5pm for the rest of January 2019. Booking is recommended to avoid disappointment!
Food photographs by Cath Kane. Cover photo from Duke Studios
