Vegans don’t always have it easy when it comes to baked goods. Because even if some bakeries now offer vegan alternatives, many cakes, biscuits and even breads still contain animal products such as butter and eggs. So how about just baking it yourself? This article will show you exactly how vegan baking works and what to look out for.
Why bake vegan at all? Being vegan means consistently avoiding products of animal origin. According to statista.de, more than 1.13 million people in Germany now live vegan – and the trend is still rising.
While a large number of meat substitutes and milk substitutes have long since found their way onto supermarket shelves, vegan baked goods are still the exception rather than the rule. Vegan baking is actually quite easy, is neither more complicated nor more expensive than traditional baking and the results are just as delicious. So why not just do it yourself?
Baking Vegan: Tips & Tricks
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been vegan for a long time, want to please vegans in your circle of acquaintances or simply want to try out vegan baking recipes – with our tips you can make your favorite baked goods without animal products.
Rely on vegetable fats: Butter is a dairy product – and therefore taboo in vegan baking. Instead, use purely vegetable, preferably palm oil-free (organic) margarine. Of course you can also use oils. The following applies: 100 grams of margarine are replaced with 75 to 80 milliliters of oil (e.g. rapeseed or sunflower oil). Nut butter, such as almond butter, is also an interesting alternative to conventional butter – make sure you use organic and fair trade quality. If you want to improve your ecological balance and save calories at the same time, simply replace 100 grams of butter with a mixture of 120 grams of oat yoghurt and a tablespoon of semolina. Another option is to make your own vegan butter.
Egg substitute instead of eggs: In traditional baked goods, eggs are used to bind the dough better. As you will quickly find out when baking vegan, this is often not absolutely necessary. If you still want to use an egg substitute, you can buy one in most organic stores and some supermarkets – or you can simply make your own egg substitute using simple ingredients that you probably have at home anyway: banana , applesauce or flaxseed can effectively replace eggs in baking. Read more: Make your own egg substitute: 6 ideas for vegan eggs
Plant-based drinks instead of cow’s milk: plant-based milk alternatives have long been found in every supermarket and most drugstores, often even in organic quality. Depending on what you’re baking, cow’s milk can usually be easily substituted one-to-one with milk alternatives such as oat milk, soy milk, or almond milk.
Plant-based cream: Plant-based cream substitutes can also be found in most supermarkets, for example based on oats, soy or rice. Alternatively, you can easily make vegan cream yourself. More on this: Vegan Cream: Recommended Alternatives
Aquafaba instead of egg whites: There are some baking recipes that use egg whites. This is the case, for example, with biscuit doughs. But there is also a vegan variant here: aquafaba. Aquafaba is the soaking liquid from chickpeas and beans. Aquafaba is whipped into the perfect vegan egg whites and is even suitable for mousse au chocolat.
Baking with vegan chocolate: What would chocolate chip cookies be without delicious pieces of chocolate in the batter? In general, many dark chocolates are vegan by nature, although you should pay close attention to the list of ingredients. Those who value sustainability and fair production conditions should choose organic and fair trade chocolate. In the (organic) supermarket you will also find vegan white chocolate and purely plant-based “milk” chocolate with different cocoa contents.
Agar-agar instead of gelatine: Anyone who bakes fruit cakes sometimes seals the fruit layer with a gelatine-based icing. However, since gelatine consists of animal bone and cartilage residues, among other things, this is not an option for vegan baking. Instead, you simply replace the gelatine with agar-agar, a purely vegetable powder made from red and blue-green algae. Here too, pay attention to organic quality in order to get a residue-free product. More on this: Gelatin substitute: vegan plant-based alternatives
What else should you keep in mind when baking vegan?
To ensure that the cruelty-free baked goods are 100 percent successful, you should not overdo it when mixing the ingredients, otherwise a vegan dough can quickly lose consistency and become tough. So sometimes it can be worth using the whisk, spatula or fork instead of the food processor to mix the ingredients.
Depending on the type of oven, your vegan pastries may also cook faster than traditional recipes state. It is best to set the timer 15 minutes before the regular end of the baking time to make sure that cakes, biscuits, rolls and the like do not become too crispy.
Incidentally, when baking bread and rolls, most recipes are already vegan – or can be veganized quickly. Instead of the honey used in some bread recipes, you can use some organic sugar beet syrup, for example, and replace the quark in quark rolls with vegan organic soy quark. Buttermilk is easily replaced with a plant-based milk alternative with a dash of vinegar.
Is Vegan Baking Healthier?
You can decide for yourself how healthy your vegan baked goods will be. For example, if you use whole grain instead of white flour and at least partially replace the sugar content in sweets with low-calorie sugar alternatives such as organic erythritol, you can definitely produce healthier baked goods.
In general, the major health benefit of vegan baking is that purely plant-based ingredients are virtually cholesterol-free, while animal products such as eggs, milk and butter contain a lot of saturated fatty acids and trans fats. With high and regular consumption, these can promote heart and vascular diseases.
Vegan is not always sustainable
While vegan ingredients are always free of animal components, they are not always sustainable, since some of the products have extremely long transport routes to the local shops (e.g. coconut oil, cocoa, chia seeds, Agr-agar) or come from conventional cultivation and are therefore are not free from environmentally harmful pesticides.
If you also want to implement the topic of sustainability in baking, you should therefore rely on fairly traded organic products and prefer regional and seasonal ingredients.
Veganized Recipes vs. Vegan Recipes
Veganized recipes are conventional recipes that are made with purely plant-based ingredients instead of the traditional ingredients. This is particularly recommended for vegan baking beginners and for everyone who would like to recreate the taste of baked goods they love. For example, have you ever baked vegan cheesecake, apple pie, vegan biscuits or purely plant-based stollen yourself? It’s easier than you might think – and the taste is in no way inferior to the original recipes.
Of course, vegan baking is also possible with a variety of more experimental, vegan recipes in which sugar is replaced with dates, for example, and unusual types of flour such as lupine, almond or coconut flour are used. These recipes are not replicas of well-known originals, but developed vegan from the outset and represent their own category. They therefore offer a less comparable, but precisely because of this, interesting taste experience. They are often all about “Clean Baking”. Due to the often exotic ingredients, you should pay close attention to the origin and, if possible, prefer regional products.
