Cooking Vegan

Cooking vegan is delicious cooking, when you get the hang of it, and impresses on the home cook just how much non-plant food we can do without in our diet—all without sacrificing flavor, aroma, texture and other eating esthetics.  

It’s perfect cooking for a New Year’s resolution to “Eat more vegetables.”

But to cook vegan, you’ll need to reconfigure your pantry with: non-dairy milk(s), vegan oils such as coconut and olive, and other fats (vegan butter, for example, or vegan mayonnaise); vegan cheeses; and vegetable broth.

You’ll probably already have some different grains (rices, say), but you’ll need to expand the palette with additional types of beans, nuts, seeds, and pastas. The variety is important because it expands the available flavors, textures and possible preparations. Of these, dried are preferred, but many canned vegetables and beans work well, especially canned tomatoes in different forms.

Dried mushrooms of several sorts are key, not merely porcini for Italian-style cooking, nor shiitake for Asian, but an entire bookshelf of dried ‘shrooms. Again, the range is key to success in the kitchen and on the plate.

A trip to an Asian grocery will help stock the pantry with helpful vegan staples such as miso paste, liquid aminos or tamari, rice vinegar, and tahini.

And there is the issue of vegan proteins such as seitan, tofu, or tempeh, I don’t need to make them look like anything. I’m less interested in vegan bratwursts heavy on the wheat gluten or Thanksgiving Tofurky heavy on the furky than on the wheat gluten or tofu alone.

The point about vegan food for me isn’t the visuals; it’s the taste and texture, both of which can be some of the more alluring in all of cooking.

With a laptop or smartphone handy, you can find vegan recipes of any stripe or style of cooking; there are thousands. Cuisines that are natively friendly for vegetarians—Indian, say, or Mexican—make for an easier transition to vegan. Much of Asian cooking is vegan to begin with or needs only a bit of tinkering to go vegan from vegetarian (or even meat-tinged).