Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [71]
Got other milks?
Baking and cooking without cow’s milk couldn’t be easier these days. It’s rare to enter a grocery store that doesn’t carry at least soymilk. (And most stores even carry different varieties, such as unsweetened, sweetened, unsweetened vanilla, sweetened vanilla, chocolate, carob, and eggnog). You can even purchase soy cream and little individual juice-box sizes for kids. Many varieties of rice milk, hemp milk, and almond milk are available for people who want or need to avoid soy products. (Because soy is one of the top ten food allergies, it may make sense for you to try a non-soy version.)
Converting cow’s milk in recipes is easy: If the recipe calls for 1 cup of cow’s milk, use 1 cup of soy, rice, hemp, or nut milk. It couldn’t get any easier than that!
A delicious way to get a larger variety of milks into your diet or baking is to make your own nut milks at home. Simply blend 2 cups of raw nuts with 3 to 4 cups of water for at least 2 minutes. Strain the resulting liquid through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth and you have delicious, homemade nut milk! This recipe works well with almonds or cashews.
Baking recipes sometimes call for buttermilk, which is a fermented product made from cow’s milk. Buttermilk is great for leavening and is used in baking because it reacts with the baking soda to form more bubbles in the batter. To make your own vegan buttermilk, simply stir 1 1/2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar into 1 cup of soymilk and allow to curdle at room temperature for at least 5 minutes before adding to your recipe. This makes 1 cup of buttermilk.
When converting a recipe by using vegan buttermilk, cut the amount of baking powder in half and use 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda for each cup of buttermilk used. Use a one-to-one ratio when replacing milk with vegan buttermilk. This technique works really well in quick breads, scones, muffins, and biscuits.
Baking with “butter”
Butter or shortening is used in baking to add fat and flavor while also creating pockets of air within dough to give pastry a light and flaky texture. Butter also is used in recipes to create a golden brown crust in baked goods and gives a moist and rich mouth feel. Because butter is now off your menu, you need to use other products to create delicious baked goods.
Traditional shortening is technically vegan and can be used in place of butter in recipes, but it’s so unhealthy and full of heart disease–inducing hydrogenated fats that I don’t recommend it.
An alternative to shortening or butter in baking recipes is to use 3/4 of the amount in an oil, such as canola or liquid unrefined coconut oil. You also can use vegan margarine for baking without much difference in the final product. Earth Balance is an excellent brand of vegan margarine; it cooks up nicely in cookies, cakes, and pie crusts.
Unrefined coconut oil, a healthy saturated fat, also can be used to replicate butter. Freeze the appropriate amount of unrefined coconut oil in a small bowl until it’s hardened. Remove the bowl from the freezer and sit it in another bowl with warm water to loosen the chunk of coconut oil. Grate the frozen oil on a cheese grater and add the pieces to the flour in a pie crust recipe to mimic the little “pebbles” of butter fat that make a light, flaky pie crust.
Cheese options: Nutritional yeast, miso, and mochi
I’ve often heard aspiring vegans lament about their fondness for cheese and how much they miss it. The flavor and texture of cheese are sometimes difficult to duplicate, but you have more wonderful options to try every day.
Soy-, nut-, and rice-based “cheeses” can be found in any natural food store, and they’re becoming more common in regular grocery stores as well. You can buy American-style, individually wrapped squares as well as blocks of cheddar-, mozzarella-, and Monterey Jack–flavored varieties. Some of the most amazingly