Vegan baking how-to
Oh, the joys of vegan baking, especially for the non-vegans among us who want to shower our loved ones with tasty treats that would please taste buds beyond the tofu crowd. If it’s not the challenge of finding an appetizing recipe or digging up the ingredients, it’s spending hours making a desert that ends up tasting like paste.
Thankfully, Michele Wolfson and her classmates at the Natural Gourmet Institute have done the leg work and found some great replacements for hard-to-convert ingredients such as eggs and butter, while also providing suggestions for flour and sugar substitutes as well. Here’s a sampling of their suggestions:
Some good butter replacements are: coconut, canola, olive, sesame, and nut oil (Note: These do not have milk fat like butter, so use 20 percent less than you would butter). Vegan egg replacers that work well are fruit and vegetable purees, starches like kuzu or arrowroot (2 tbs kuzu or arrowroot plus 3 tbs water equals 1 egg) or a "flax egg" (1 tbs flax seed, ground and then added to 2 tbs water equals 1 egg or 2 egg whites).
By substituting ingredients one by one, they were able to create scrumptious vegan versions of tasty traditional recipes such as peanut butter cookies and carrot cake cupcakes, and suggest ambitious bakers do the same. Yeah, whatever.
Full story at Good.is.
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