• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Here’s a basic checklist you can use to begin veganizing recipes:

Look through your recipes and choose a favorite that you know how to cook already. Familiarity with a recipe gives you a mental image of what to aim for. If you know what the finished product is supposed to look and taste like, you’ll find it easier to adjust your recipe as you work your way through it.

Circle all the ingredients that aren’t vegan: dairy, eggs, gelatin, meat, fish, and so on. Start substituting the ingredients with the appropriate amount of your chosen vegan substitute, as detailed throughout this chapter. Not every vegan ingredient is substituted one for one.

Try to use the same techniques, steps, times, and temperatures that are used in the original recipe. Doing so gives you a good platform from which to make future changes.

Take notes as you cook. You’re basically writing your own new recipe, so you want to be sure and have a detailed record of how you did it for the future. Write down how much of each ingredient you used, and whether you did anything different than the description in the original recipe.

Some traditional egg or dairy recipes have a yellow coloring or certain savory flavor to them. To re-create that color use a pinch of turmeric or a little prepared mustard. For the missing flavor, try adding a little nutritional yeast or instant vegan broth powder.

Taking Advantage of Mock Meats

Some vegans miss the mouth feel of animal protein. It’s human to enjoy a variety of textures, so including chewy, dense foods is a good way to ensure that your diet stays interesting. Luckily, protein alternatives offer an incredible array of textures and tastes on which to build new recipes. These fake meats can be like a blank canvas; most have naturally mild tastes, so you can create almost any flavor profile you want with herbs, spices, and seasoning.

Hundreds of vegan foods that mimic the animal foods you may be missing are available. Consider these wonderful alternatives:

Vegan jerky made from soy, wheat gluten, and mushroom bases

“Sausages” in many different varieties, including Italian, spicy Mexican chipotle, and apple sage

Deli “meat” slices that come in turkey, bologna, and ham flavors

Premade roast loaves for Thanksgiving

Meatballs and great pizza toppings like vegan pepperoni and Canadian bacon

Animal-free hot dogs and burger patties, which may be made with a soybean base or with nuts, vegetables, grains, and beans

Other vegans don’t want anything with a fleshy texture in their mouths — hence, part of the reason they became vegan! Still, if you’re in this camp, you’ll find it easy to turn vegetables into the hearty portion of your meal. Here are some ideas:

Try cutting vegetables like carrots, zucchini, and celery into larger chunks in your next stew. Doing so gives you those big bites of veggie flavor to crunch through.

Mushrooms offer a wonderful savory taste and texture that can lend a new layer of flavor to stir-fry, sandwiches, pasta sauces, or soups.

If you want a brunch recipe for vegan sausages, but the fake-meat versions taste a little too much like pork for your comfort, you can choose from many excellent recipes to make your own sausage “links” or “patties” out of beans, grains, and vegetables.

Soybeans as protein

The incredible soybean isn’t much to look at in its natural state. It looks like any other bean. Yet this incredible vegetable has become the base for countless meatless meals. Two vegan power foods, tofu and tempeh, are derived from the soybean and can play a part in your daily menu planning. I give you the lowdown on these power players in the following sections.

Tofu

Tofu, sometimes called bean curd on Chinese restaurant menus, is basically soy cheese. A coagulant, such as naturally occurring calcium sulfate, gypsum, or magnesium chloride, is added to soymilk to curdle the liquid. The curds are separated and formed into cakes of tofu and