How To Veganize Recipes: A Guide

If there is one thing I hate, it’s the implication that all vegan food is tasteless, healthy-tasting, and made solely of kale and flax seeds.

It’s not! There are loads of incredible plant-based recipes out there, especially within the past few years. There are tons of vegan cooking and baking blogs with recipes that taste amazing.

It’s also possible to “veganize” old, familiar favorites that you’ve enjoyed in the past – that is, to take a recipe that uses dairy, eggs, or meat and make it with plant-based ingredients instead.

It’s perfectly normal to crave old favorites, and eating vegan shouldn’t feel restrictive. Food is important to all of us, and some foods might remind you of good times. Unfortunately, some of the foods you’ve loved in the past are full of those animal products that you’re not eating anymore.

So if you want to satisfy your craving and still stick to your plant-based values, then you’ll have to figure out how to veganize that recipe.

It seems like it should be simple enough, right? After all, you can buy vegan butter, egg replacement, and soy milk at the supermarket, can’t you? Yup, and these work great.

But once you start baking, you’ll realize that some recipes definitely veganize better than others.

So what are you to do? How do you know if a recipe is good to veganize? Here are some tips.

Read through a recipe’s ingredient list

It’s important to read through a recipe first so you can get a good idea of how many ingredients you’ll need to switch out. It’s easy to swap out butter and a couple of eggs in a cookie recipe. The final product will taste pretty similar to the original recipe.

So let’s try it! As an example, let’s veganize a recipe so I can show you how easy it is.

Let’s use the recipe on the back of every Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip bag: a familiar recipe for lots of us.

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, softened

¾ cup granulated sugar

¾ cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups chocolate chips

1 cup chopped nuts

recipe from https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/174864/original-nestle-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies/

First, identify the ingredients that aren’t vegan. The only non-vegan ingredients here are the butter, the eggs, and possibly the chocolate chips.

Next, think of substitutes for these ingredients. Do this by considering the functions of the ingredient you’re replacing, and what would make for a good replacement. Or if you want a foolproof way to substitute, use a resource like my butter guide and egg guide to tell you what might work best for your recipe. 

It may seem a bit complicated at first. But after you’ve been baking for a while, knowing how to replace ingredients will become second nature!

Replacing the butter

Butter is the fat in the cookie that makes it tender and gives it richness and structure. The dairy butter can be replaced one-for-one with a vegan butter, which you can find in most supermarkets these days. It can also be replaced one-for-one with coconut oil. Coconut oil works well because it’s solid at room temperature and can be softened – just like butter!

Replacing the eggs

The eggs in this recipe can also be replaced in several different ways. It can be helpful to understand the differences between egg alternatives and which product works best in which recipe. Again, this may seem confusing and complicated at first, but it gets easier with practice.

In a cookie like this, I would either use ground flax seeds (if I didn’t care about there being flax bits throughout the cookie), or egg replacement powder (if I did care about flax bits). Both of these options will help bind the cookie dough together, without adding much extra texture, flavor, or moisture.

Replacing the chocolate chips

You might not have to replace this ingredient! Many chocolate chip brands are incidentally vegan, but some do contain milk. Check to be sure, if you want to avoid all animal products.

Baking the cookies with your new ingredients

For a simple recipe like this, just use the softened coconut oil in place of the butter. It will cream together with the sugar in a similar way to butter.

As well, use the flax seeds or egg replacement powder when the recipe tells you to put in eggs. (Just be sure to mix it with water a few minutes ahead of time so that it can properly gel up before you add it in.)

Other than that, bake the cookies exactly as the package says.

Congrats! You’ve just successfully veganized a recipe.

When does veganizing a recipe not work?

Sadly, this doesn’t always work out so smoothly.

When looking at a potential recipe, you should also consider how heavily a recipe relies on animal products. The more animal products a recipe uses, the more difficult it is to veganize the recipe and still maintain the original taste and texture.

This is especially true if a recipe uses a lot of eggs. 

Eggs are a tricky ingredient. In my experience, they’re the hardest thing to successfully replace in a recipe.

My own general rule is that one or two eggs are easy to replace in most recipes (check out my egg replacement guide here!).

But when you get into recipes that use three, four, five eggs, it’s difficult to achieve the exact results of the initial recipe without losing texture and flavor. That recipe is relying a lot on the eggs.

Recipes with a lot of eggs can be successfully veganized, of course. But you may need to do some experimenting to get the result you want, and you might not be successful on the first try.

Additionally, you should note that recipes that use just egg yolks or just egg whites (such as meringues, custards, and macarons) hold additional challenges. Yolks and whites have their own unique properties, and these recipes are relying heavily on them to give the final product structure and texture.

So unlike chocolate chip cookies, it’s nearly impossible to just replace the eggs in a macaron with something else.

Let’s look at an example!

Take this ingredient list for a simple custard (the original recipe can be found here).

4 cups whole milk   

1 tablespoon vanilla extract   

1 teaspoon butter   

4 eggs   

½ cup white sugar   

3 tablespoons cornstarch

recipe from https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/258755/simple-custard/

Four cups of whole milk is a lot, but that could be replaced with soy milk or coconut milk. And one tablespoon of butter is simple enough to replace.

But four eggs?

In this recipe, the eggs are really working to provide taste, texture, and thickness. And ground flax seeds, egg replacement powder, aquafaba, or applesauce (some of my usual ways of replacing eggs in bread and cookies) would definitely not cut it here.

So in this case, I would recommend specifically searching out a vegan custard recipe. Most of the recipes I have seen out there use coconut milk or coconut cream, plus extra cornstarch to get the proper thickness. Some even add a touch of turmeric to mimic the yellow color of egg yolks!

These recipes will taste delicious and will take into account the missing eggs by substituting for them in a way that works.

Which brings me to my next point…

Use specifically vegan recipes

If you want to veganize your grandmother’s carrot cake recipe because it’s sentimental to you, I fully understand. Or if you find a recipe in a magazine that looks super amazing, but it’s not vegan, that shouldn’t stop you from trying it.

With the magic of substitutions, you can eat many of the foods that you enjoyed before eating plant-based!

But there is a whole world of delicious vegan food made by and for vegans that tastes absolutely amazing.

These people really understand how to use plant-based ingredients to their advantage, rather than just substituting plant butter and soy cheese for dairy butter and cheese and calling it good.

For that reason, I would recommend checking out two of my favorite plant-based foodie bloggers, Minimalist Baker and Oh She Glows for some easy-to-follow, super delicious recipes.

There’s really something to be said for following the wisdom of someone who’s been baking vegan for years and who knows the tips and tricks to making delicious plant-based food. Good vegan bakers and cooks are seriously innovative, and you can learn a lot from them.

Happy baking!