10 Helpful Cooking Tips For A Vegan Thanksgiving
If you keep a vegan diet, the cards are already stacked against you when it comes to a hassle-free Thanksgiving. Not to mention it’s just not a hassle-free holiday, even for the non-vegans! Help is on the way: 10 helpful cooking tips for a vegan Thanksgiving.
Yeast flakes instead of cheese
Nutritional yeast can be blended up with coconut milk to make a delicious vegan mac and cheese sauce for your side dish, or put on your baked potatoes, or blended in with tofu to add to any casseroles that require a creamy cheese layer. Keep a can around and experiment.
Source: Yummly.com
Authentic tasting chicken broth
Just because you’re vegan doesn’t mean you’ll forever miss the nostalgic, nurturing flavors of chicken broth. Most poultry seasonings are actually completely vegan—usually consisting of some blend of spices and herbs—and will give your water that chicken broth flavor. But most importantly on Thanksgiving, you can pour this broth over your vegan variety of “turkey” to keep it moist and make it taste like the real thing.
Source: OneGreenPlanet.org
Easy vegan whipped cream
You don’t need to eat your pie dry while all the non-vegans dump whipped cream on theirs. If you refrigerate a can of full-fat coconut milk overnight, it easily whips up into an airy, creamy vegan whipped cream the next day.
Source: Tasty-yummies.com
Vinegar + non-dairy milk= vegan buttermilk
Buttermilk is (sadly for our intestines) a staple of food history in America. You have to have it at Thanksgiving! But, just by the name, it sounds like something a vegan can never have or possibly recreate. But we’ve found a way around that! Adding white or apple cider vinegar to the non-dairy milk of your choice gives you that nice thick, buttery consistency and flavor of real buttermilk. See the full recipe here.
Source: Veganfoodaddict.wordpress.com
Use this to replace eggs when baking
If you need that gelatinous consistency of whipped up raw eggs when making a vegan custard to fill up a pie crust, just mix together some chia meal with water—it will thicken up into an egg-akin consistency.
Source: Foodrenegade.com
Green “butter” better than real butter
If you need fat to moisten your vegan cake, you can almost perfectly recreate the consistency of butter with some almond oil or coconut oil, plus mashed up avocado. This mixture also makes a great buttercream-esque frosting to put between layers of cake.
Source: Avocadocentral.com
Vegan bacon flavor is real
Yes, it is. Artificial flavoring, believe it or not, has saved the vegan bacon-lover’s life. Mot Bacon Salt is artificially flavored, completely vegan, and makes anything you put it on taste like the smoky, fatty meat. This will come especially in handy when you have leftover tofurkey and want to make vegan “BLT’s” the next day.
Source: Fakemeats.com
Vegan Worcestershire sauce
Worcestershire sauce is essential at any large meal, and can actually be made vegan with some apple-cider vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger and a few other simple seasonings listed in this recipe.
Source: Marthastewart.com
Chickpea flour
If it’s a tradition in your house to fry up all things good on Thanksgiving, like doughnuts and sponge cake, it’s hard to find a good vegan batter that’s crispy and doughy. But chickpea flour is your savior: just mix it with beer, water or dairy free milk for an incredible batter.
Source: Foodnetwork.com
Coconut sour cream
Baked potatoes can be awfully dry without sour cream. It’s easy to make a vegan variety of sour cream. Just mix up chilled canned coconut milk with some non-dairy milk, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and olive oil. Find the full recipe here.
Source: Nourishingmeals.com