textured protein alternatives

I’ve been wondering if there’sa way to use soaked hazelnuts (or other nuts) as a sort of texturized vegetable protein/ like to use in place of ground beef in recipes. Has anyone tried this?

I find that if I get a really firm tofu and then crumble it up with my hands the results can be like a ground beef texture, esp. good in chili in my opinion.  I also do this when making lasagna.

I haven't tried such things with soaked nuts.  Well I do make a vegan cheese out of cashews, but never a meat textured thing.

There are lots of recipes online for ground "meat" using walnuts. I may have tried one waaaaay back 20 years ago when I was first trying out veganism, but I don't remember anything about it. Look up a few to get the gist, then use whatever nuts you have.

Back when I had an oven, I made nut loaf for my (omnivore) husband quite a bit. Most of the recipes don't actually have all that many nuts in them, so I already put extra. I made a lentil based one with lots of sunflower seeds and walnuts, chopped up fine. Shelling walnuts is time consuming, so I often replace some of them with sunflower seeds, which I always have. Nuts work really well for texture and fat in that type of recipe.

I actually like a small amount of buckwheat in vegan chili for texture. I think it's probably too soft to actually mimic meat, but it's a nice texture anyway.

At a glance, this recipe looks pretty similar to the one I used to make.

https://food52.com/recipes/31927-lentil-walnut-loaf

Since I was using more nuts and fewer breadcrumbs, I grated all the vegetables to keep the texture a bit smoother and help it bind better. The extra nuts provided better texture than diced vegetables anyway.

David Huang wrote:I find that if I get a really firm tofu and then crumble it up with my hands the results can be like a ground beef texture, esp. good in chili in my opinion.

Will second this and add that, if you aren't averse to using a microwave oven, a combination of freezing extra-firm tofu, then thawing and squeezing out the liquid, then crumbling the tofu and microwaving the crumbles can result in even firmer texture.  If I do this in batch and don't want to re-freeze the crumbles, then I may put the crumbles in a food dehydrator and make them into quasi-textured vegetable protein (TVP) which can be stored at room temperature.  Use the crumbles in any number of veggie burger recipes as a texturing agent.  Good luck!

Thanks everyone who answered, especially Jan,  Looking for hazelnut or walnut based recipes because that’s what grows locally to me.

Nuts are healthy and I use various ones in food I make, which is whole food, except for peanuts to avoid a reaction. I would really like to be in a community with others all growing the vegetation for food and materials together for what we need, living sustainably and becoming more and more independent from being involved with the civilization all around.