I was, in fact, largely thinking of recipes where the butter, eggs, cream, etc. are doing a lot of the flavor and texture work. It sounds like that’s something that is lost in an eggs/dairy free diet. This is valuable information.
Next question: would you be able to recommend a good source of dessert recipes that make the most of veg*an limitations on ingredients (rather than attempting to imperfectly substitute for eggs/dairy/etc.)?
(My motivation for these questions, by the way, is that I regularly bake desserts for my friends, and I’d like to be able to make sure that any people of my acquaintance who have veg*an dietary limitations don’t feel left out.)
There seem to be a lot of vegan dessert cookbooks out there these days, but of course they are of varying quality. My personal favorites are by Isa Chandra Moskowitz; the link goes to the Desserts category of her blog, so you can see if you like her style.
One really specific recipe that I found surprising, in terms of successfully replacing a food that depends heavily on dairy, is this chocolate mousse. The other creamy food it is easy to successfully replace milk in is pudding; a blancmange (aka Jello cook’n’serve) will work fine with soymilk or with a thick enough nut milk. (Rice milk in particular is thin enough that you have to adjust the ratios or cooking time to get it to set properly.)
Glancing quickly at the chocolate mousse recipe, something occurred to me: how do you deal with vegan ingredients being more expensive than non-vegan ones? For instance, vegan chocolate is way pricier around here than regular chocolate. Maple syrup is VERY expensive (is imitation syrup vegan?).
I tend to figure that price increase on individual ingredients is compensated for by the fact that avoiding animal products encourages me to buy food in an earlier state of processing, which tends to be less expensive. Also, some aspects of a vegetarian or vegan diet are less expensive than the alternative; for instance, protein from dried beans is often cheaper than protein from meat. I have never found groceries a problematically large portion of my budget.
I think imitation syrup is usually high fructose corn syrup with colors and flavors added, so in most cases it is probably vegan. I’m not sure it would taste good in this recipe, but you could experiment.
Thank you for your response!
I was, in fact, largely thinking of recipes where the butter, eggs, cream, etc. are doing a lot of the flavor and texture work. It sounds like that’s something that is lost in an eggs/dairy free diet. This is valuable information.
Next question: would you be able to recommend a good source of dessert recipes that make the most of veg*an limitations on ingredients (rather than attempting to imperfectly substitute for eggs/dairy/etc.)?
(My motivation for these questions, by the way, is that I regularly bake desserts for my friends, and I’d like to be able to make sure that any people of my acquaintance who have veg*an dietary limitations don’t feel left out.)
There seem to be a lot of vegan dessert cookbooks out there these days, but of course they are of varying quality. My personal favorites are by Isa Chandra Moskowitz; the link goes to the Desserts category of her blog, so you can see if you like her style.
One really specific recipe that I found surprising, in terms of successfully replacing a food that depends heavily on dairy, is this chocolate mousse. The other creamy food it is easy to successfully replace milk in is pudding; a blancmange (aka Jello cook’n’serve) will work fine with soymilk or with a thick enough nut milk. (Rice milk in particular is thin enough that you have to adjust the ratios or cooking time to get it to set properly.)
Thanks for the links, I will check them out!
Glancing quickly at the chocolate mousse recipe, something occurred to me: how do you deal with vegan ingredients being more expensive than non-vegan ones? For instance, vegan chocolate is way pricier around here than regular chocolate. Maple syrup is VERY expensive (is imitation syrup vegan?).
I tend to figure that price increase on individual ingredients is compensated for by the fact that avoiding animal products encourages me to buy food in an earlier state of processing, which tends to be less expensive. Also, some aspects of a vegetarian or vegan diet are less expensive than the alternative; for instance, protein from dried beans is often cheaper than protein from meat. I have never found groceries a problematically large portion of my budget.
I think imitation syrup is usually high fructose corn syrup with colors and flavors added, so in most cases it is probably vegan. I’m not sure it would taste good in this recipe, but you could experiment.