PHOTO CREDIT: Evan Casey
Brandon Hawthorne had once sold Italian ice, hot dogs and hamburgers from food carts. But these days, his wife, Arielle, and he have embarked upon a completely different food venture. This past spring, they launched Twisted Plants, a food truck that offers vegan foods exclusively.
Arielle switched to a plant-based diet after a health scare in 2016. She began as a vegetarian and then went to vegan foods. The couple experimented with recipes in their home kitchen and tested creations like vegan Creamy Mac & Cheeze with friends and relatives. Brandon notes that some people couldn’t tell the difference between traditional macaroni and cheese and their vegan version. Brandon also adopted a vegetarian diet and got the idea to start a vegan food truck.
The couple operates Twisted Plants around Brandon’s full-time job as a truck driver and while raising two young daughters. Just in their first season, Brandon says they’ve developed a following with not only vegans and vegetarians, but with people who want to eat healthier and help reduce the environmental impact of commercial livestock farming. “It’s a small niche, but it’s gaining a lot of popularity,” he says.
Twisted Plants offers a mix of comfort foods and American classics like burgers. They began using the plant-based Impossible Burger, but due to supply issues, they’ve since switched to Beyond Meat or Lightlife patties. Customers can choose from burgers such as the Up In Smoke, in which the patty is topped with vegan ingredients like cheddar cheese, smoky tempeh bacon, crispy onions and mayonnaise. The Superbad patty has queso cheese, jalapeño peppers, house chipotle mayonnaise and grilled onions.
The vegan drumsticks are shipped from a vegan market in New York and topped with Brandon and Arielle’s house-made sauce. Sandwiches include How High, which mimics barbecued pulled pork and is made with jackfruit—the latest rock star of the vegan world. Jackfruit is nutrient-dense, low in calories and comes from the jack tree, a species of tree in the fig and mulberry family that grows in India and parts of Southeast Asia. The trees are known to need little water and produce high yields.
“We use jackfruit for the pulled pork sandwich, as well as the loaded fries (waffle fries with barbecued jackfruit, queso, barbecue sauce, chipotle mayonnaise and jalapeños),” Brandon says. “It’s marinated for five hours to become tender and absorb the seasonings, and you can’t tell the difference whether it’s jackfruit, pork or shredded chicken.” Arielle adds that jackfruit is very versatile and takes on the flavor of whatever you’re cooking it with. “It definitely looks a little unusual. Ripe jackfruit is sweet, but when you’re cooking jackfruit, you want to use young, green jackfruit that hasn’t fully ripened yet and doesn’t have a sweet taste, so it takes on whatever flavor you add to it,” she explains.
Customers can also get sides of waffle fries or vegan mozzarella sticks, which look and taste like the dairy version of the pub favorite. There’s also fresh-squeezed strawberry lemonade.
Twisted Plants appears at N. 53rd St. and W. Fond du Lac Ave. and at the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division on Watertown Plank Road. They do weekend events such as the West Allis Farmers Market Food Truck Fridays and Zocalo Food Park. They also participate in Fooda Office Lunch Service that brings different food vendors to workplaces, and they offer catering for parties and events. Locations and menu specials can be found by visiting facebook.com/twistedplantsmke.
