Vegan Baking

One of the benefits of Vegan Butter is that since you’re building it up from scratch, you can have full control of what you want it to be. It doesn’t have to go down the route of completely replicating traditional butter if you don’t want it to. Why would you want to replicate the texture of butter but not necessarily the flavor? Frostings and short doughs such as tart dough, pie crust and shortbread come to mind. You have much more variability in your end result if you can control flavor through your actual fat in addition to other ingredients. Imagine chocolate croissants where the butter is replaced with a fat that has the texture and flavor characteristics of both chocolate and butter. This is the reason I developed Chocolate Vegan Butter. Oh and you can spread it on toast too.

Traditional bakers have been able to create a vast variety of foods over the last several hundred years of baking evolution. It’s surprising when you realise that everything form puddings to cakes to cookies vary little in the range of ingredients used. Versatile ingredients such as flour, sugar, fat and eggs make this sort of variation possible. These are the building blocks of pastry. Vegan baking is easy when all you have to worry about is manipulating flour, sugar and fat. So what are we do to do in regards to replacing the almighty egg? There is a legend that the Romans believed in chicken eggs so much, they mixed them into their concrete. To first understand what we need to replicate this building block we need to understand what an egg does in the world of baking.

The more I learn about pastry, the more I realize that European pastry is on a completely different level compared to classic American pastry. My impression is that European pastry is all about introducing flavor depth through manipulating eggs, butter and technique. Croissants, strudel and danish pastries come to mind. American pastry, on the other hand, tends to build off bold flavors with a strong sugar backbone accentuated by spices. Apple pie, cupcakes and cookies come to mind here. 

This vegan Apple Pecan Granola recipe brings on the apple flavor with the help of both apple chunks and apple sauce. Cashew butter forms it's base and packs extra protein so you'll have sustained energy throughout your morning. I go low on the sugar for this same reason and to give the other ingredients a chance to contribute flavor. Nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon work to highlight the apple. Chopped pecans toast during baking and add a welcome nutty crunch. Once you've chosen your preferred apples and baked this granola to perfection you can add it to ice cream, splash it on non-dairy milk or top it with a dollop of non-dairy yogurt.

Several years ago, one of my favorite restaurants, Millennium, in San Francisco had a particular bread spread they would serve with fresh bread, just as you were seated. This particular spread wasn't buttery, but it had a particular creamy buttery oomph that actually made it taste better than butter when it was slathered on your crusty slice. And since it obviously wasn't butter, you could spread on even more without getting funny looks from your Mom across the table. You could run out of it and confidently ask for more, again and again! Then one day they switched over to a fava bean-based spread that was sadly sub par and the bread spread I loved oh so much mysteriously disappeared from existence. This savory bread spread made a lasting impression on me and I knew that one day I would rise to the challenge and create my own rich version.

Orange Icing is perfect for doughnuts, cookies or cakes such as Rosemary Olive Oil Semolina Cake. It features fresh orange juice that lends a bright burst of flavor, coconut oil to allow it to solidify properly and a touch of vanilla extract for depth of flavor.

As I progress in my vegan baking adventures I strive for quality ingredients that give me as much control as possible over the flavors and textures I'm trying to convey. I also love breaking foods down to their most basic components and building them back up again, learning and getting unnecessarily excited along the way. For some people it's TV. For me it's this sort of food hacking. 

I recently decided that I wanted to create a high quality vegan butter because I began to tire of the store bought yellow goop that I was so steadily relying on. What if I don't want all that diacetyl flavoring, beta carotene coloring, palm oil and who knows what else? It reminded me of one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from the 80's: Happy Fun Ball. "Don't taunt Happy Fun Ball". My vegan butter experimentation ended up being more successful than I imagined. What if I made my own shortening?

I love caramel because it's the closest thing there is to food alchemy. Ok, maybe chocolate is close to this too but caramel involves a few basic non-exotic ingredients and a simple process. The end result is something that's truly extraordinary and more than the sum of it's parts. One of the great things about caramel is how you can just swap in certain fats and sugars to create caramels with amazing layers of flavors. The more I experiment with working with caramel this way, the more surprised I am. 

Making this vegan Easy Granola recipe is only slightly harder and much more fun than scooping it out of the bulk bins at the local health food store. It features almond butter for its base, rolled oats, cinnamon and nutmeg and just the right amount of walnuts and pecans to round out the crunch. A touch of raisins add a welcoming sweetness. 

I prefer to not overload with sugar in the morning so my granola recipes tend to err on the side of reduced sweetness which is a contrast from most store-bought granola. If you like your granola sweet then you may consider adding a few Tablespoons additional sugar. The reduced sweetness allows other flavor nuances to come through. The almond butter toasts during baking which brings on a rich flavor. A small amount of unrefined coconut oil increases flavor complexity further. Use this granola recipe as a base for future granola recipes. Enjoy it with non-dairy milk, top it with non-dairy yogurt or crumble it over ice cream.

Holiday dinners at my Godparent's house was always a special occasion. The food was inspriational but the the one dish that my brother and I looked forward to all year was the simple but perfect implementation of garlic bread. This consisted of a store-bought flute of San Fancisco sourdough, sliced but leaving the bottom crust intact so the slices could be torn off as the loaf worked its way around the table. This loaf was buttered between the slices, wrapped in tin foil and warmed in the oven. Buttering the slices while leaving the loaf intact had the advantage of ensuring both sides of each slice was buttered. Wrapping the loaf in tin foil had the benefit of allowing the entire loaf to be saturated with buttery aromas and flavors during its time in the oven and the tin foil could be folded back over the loaf in between servings to keep the bread warm while it was on the table. Brilliant!

My brother and I eventually begged my parents to adopt this bread tradition for holiday feasts at our house. When I adopted a vegan diet we switched from butter to margarine and although the results were satisfactory, there seemed to be somthing lacking; substituting margarine doesn't always work as well as butter 100% of the time. 

Several years later I was having a dinner with friends and everyone at the table was falling over themselves in anticipation for Vlad's famous garlic bread spread. What was in this bread spread? I never found out but it was thick, dairy-based, rich, spreadable and smelled what a bread spread would probably smell like if you took the best elments of butter and sharp cheddar. Without even tasting it I was mesmerized by it. What if I combined these two garlic bread methods to make a vegan rich, buttery bread spread that could take garlic bread to another level? 

This bread spread recipe features extra virgin olive oil, onion, garlic, fresh tarragon and just a touch of white wine vinegar to envoke a complex buttery flavor with a sharp cheese inspired finish.

Traditional flour is ground endosperm powder which is the result of the flour mill removing most of the hard pieces and hence, nutrition from the wheat berry. I'm a huge fan of whole sprouted grains because they're more flavorful and contain significantly more nutrients than bread made with traditional flour. This Flourless Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread recipe utilizes sprouted wheat berries that are then ground into a purée. This requires a substantially hardy food processor. If you're not sure if your food processor is powerful enough, look on the bottom. It should say at least 6.5 Amps or "6.5 A". 

This bread was difficult to design due to the nature of the wheat berry. This hardy seed contains the germ which is the heart and soul of the seed. The germ is the embryo of the plant in its dormant state. It's accompanied by the starchy endosperm which acts as fuel for the germ when it sprouts or germinates. This package is encased in a firm fibrous shell called the bran. This protects the seed kind of like an egg shell protects an egg.