Vegan Nduja: What Ve-du-ya Is and Six Ways to Spread It

By Jodie Smith, Product & Hamper Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Vegan nduja is a soft, spreadable chilli paste that does the job Calabrian ’nduja does, without the pork. The jar we stock is Belazu Ve-du-ya, 170g for $13.95. It spreads onto crackers, stirs through pasta and gives a vegan board something rich.

What ’nduja is, and what Belazu did with it

’Nduja, said roughly as en-doo-ya, is a Calabrian salume: pork and chilli worked soft enough to spread with a knife. The texture is the point. It lets cured meat behave like a condiment, on toast or through a sauce.

Ve-du-ya is the vegan version from Belazu, named for how the original sounds out loud. It comes red, oily and loose in the jar, chilli first with savoury depth behind it. Belazu put it forward as a pizza topping and a cooking paste, so it takes heat as well as it sits on a cracker.

Across our vegan options, the plant based answer to a grazing table is nearly always another vegetable. This is the only spreadable nduja style paste we stock in any form, so it changes the shape of a board rather than adding a bowl to it. Rose harissa is a different job: brighter, and better cooked into things.

Six ways to spread it

1. On a cracker, first. A quarter teaspoon spread thin, not spooned on in a lump. A plain crackerthin at $3.49 keeps the flavour where you want it, and its label tells you whether the cracker is vegan too.

2. On hot toast. Spread it while the bread is warm so the oil loosens, then finish with lemon zest or capers. The fastest way to learn how hot your jar is.

3. Through pasta, off the heat. A heaped teaspoon a head, loosened with a spoonful of pasta water. Cooked hard it turns bitter, warmed gently it coats everything.

4. Melted into beans or tomatoes. A tablespoon into chickpeas with tinned tomatoes is a braise in fifteen minutes. Let it dissolve in the oil first, as you would a curry paste.

5. Dotted on pizza before it bakes. Dot rather than spread, so it stays in hot pockets instead of turning the base red. No cheese required.

6. Whisked into roasting oil. Two teaspoons for a tray of cauliflower or potatoes. Thinned with lemon juice, the same mix dresses a warm vegetable salad.

Six uses from one jar is the case for the cupboard, not a single lunch. It sits in the vegan range, alongside the jars behind a vegetarian Christmas grazing board and vegan Christmas food that is not an afterthought.

Vegan nduja questions

What is ’nduja?

A Calabrian salume of pork and chilli, worked soft enough to spread rather than slice. It is sold in a jar or a small log and used as a condiment.

What does vegan nduja taste like?

Chilli first, then a savoury, salty depth, with enough oil to carry both. Hot rather than sweet, so it does not behave like a chutney beside cheese.

What do you spread nduja on?

Crackers, hot toast, pizza and flatbread. It also dissolves into pasta, beans and roasting oil, which is how a jar gets finished rather than half used.

Is Ve-du-ya spicy?

Warm rather than a dare, and heat builds across a grazing session, so start with a quarter teaspoon. With chilli avoiders at the table, give it its own bowl and knife.

How long does an open jar keep in the fridge?

Go by the storage line on the label, since the maker knows what is in the jar. Either way: fridge once opened, a clean dry spoon each time, surface pressed flat.

One jar, one better board

One jar covers the vegan guest at a table of eight. Add Ve-du-ya to the rest of your vegan options, with free Australia-wide shipping over $100. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post. If it is a gift rather than a restock, our vegan hampers are packed by hand.