Pizza, cheesecake, muffins, Black Forest gateau: vegan baking produces delicious bread and pastries without dairy or eggs
- Some types of dough – such as yeast dough and shortcrust pastry – don’t need an egg. You can use soya flour, bananas, apple, tofu or chia seeds instead
- A thickener like maize flour or blancmange powder can be used in cheesecake mix, while sweet potatoes and beans are suitable for brownies
Whether it’s shortcrust pastry, cake mixture or yeast dough, or perhaps Black Forest gateau or cheesecake, you can bake all of the classics the vegan way. Sounds complicated? It’s not – when you know how certain ingredients react and harmonise with each other.
“Since baking has often got to be quick and easy, many recipes use an egg as a thickener,” notes TV chef and cookbook author Stina Spiegelberg. In earlier times, however, many recipes made do without an egg, she says, simply because few or none were available.
Spiegelberg says it’s easy to replace eggs so long as you maintain the proper ratio of dry to liquid ingredients in the dough and pay attention to the dough’s consistency – not that egg substitutes are needed for muffins or sponge cake.
Baking cake or dough one-to-one from a non-vegan recipe and simply leaving out only the eggs “very rarely turns out well”, remarks cookbook author Corinna Schober. Bring on the vegan egg replacer powder, then?
“I’ve never used it,” Schober says, “because I’m of the opinion, and have learned from experience, that you don’t need it for vegan baking.”