Vegan Baking E-Book

Dunja Gulin

• Herausgeber: Ryland Peters & Small
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 159

Beschreibung

Whether you are a full-time vegan or you choose to cut out animal products whenever possible, there's no need to miss out on your favourite cakes. Baking without eggs, butter and milk is not only possible, but also easy and just as delicious as what you are used to baking. There are now so many alternative ingredients available from supermarkets and healthfood stores and with Dunja Gulin's recipes, you'll have all the inspiration you need to start baking. Dunja's background and expertise in natural nutrition provides invaluable insight in this collection of nourishing vegan bakes. Simple Cakes and Muffins to try include Muffins with Summer Berries; Fancy Cakes like the stunning Chocolate Layer Cake are sure to impress; for a mid-morning snack, try Slices & Bars like Bean Brownies and Fruity Oat Bars; choose from Cookies and Biscuits such as Hazelnut Bites and Coffee-Toffee Cookies; vegan Pies, Tarts & Strudels can be just as good as real pastry, so try a Pear Strudel; bake vegan Herb Focaccia and you will never buy regular Bread again; and finally, Special Baked Treats like Jam Parcels and Baked Plum Dumplings make mouthwatering desserts.

Leseprobe

VEGAN

Baking

VEGAN

Baking

MORE THAN 50 RECIPES FOR VEGAN-FRIENDLY CAKES, COOKIES & OTHER BAKED TREATS

DUNJA GULIN

photography by

Clare Winfield

Senior Designer Toni Kay

Commissioning Editor Céline Hughes

Head of Production Patricia Harrington

Editorial Director Julia Charles

Creative Director Leslie Harrington

Prop Stylists Jo Harris and Liz Belton

Food Stylist Lucy Williams

Indexer Hilary Bird

First published in 2013 and 2017 as The Vegan Baker

This edition published in 2024

by Ryland Peters & Small

20–21 Jockey’s Fields

London WC1R 4BW

and 341 E 116th St,

New York NY 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text © Dunja Gulin 2013, 2017 and 2024 Design and photographs © Ryland Peters & Small 2013, 2017 and 2024

The author’s moral rights have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78879-597-5

E-ISBN: 978-1-78879-620-0

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

Printed in China

Notes

• Both British (Metric) and American (Imperial plus US cup) measurements are included in these recipes for your convenience, however it is important to work with one set of measurements only and not alternate between the two within a recipe. Liquid measurements listed in ounces should be considered fluid ounces. All spoon measurements are level unless otherwise specified. A teaspoon is 5 ml and a tablespoon is 15 ml.

• Ovens should be preheated to the specified temperature. If using a fan-assisted oven, adjust temperatures accordingly.

Contents

Introduction

Basics

1 SIMPLE CAKES & MUFFINS

2 FANCY CAKES

3 SLICES & BARS

4 COOKIES & BISCUITS

5 PIES, TARTS & STRUDELS

6 BREAD & SAVOURY BAKING

7 SPECIAL BAKED TREATS

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Baking: it has always been a magical word for me. Sweet baking was, and still is, even more magical, and I think many people will understand what I’m saying! The smell of freshly baked crescent rolls my nonna used to make for Christmas is one of the few things I can remember from my early childhood.

Maybe that’s why my first attempts in the kitchen were baking simple cakes, learning how to flip pancakes and burning batch after batch of cookies. But I never gave up.

At high school, I decided to stop eating meat, and later when I left home to study I decided to try eating more vegan food after sampling so many of the disastrous ‘vegetarian’ dishes we were offered in student canteens. Back then, finding a vegan dessert that wasn’t either a brick or a mass of soggy gruel was next to impossible, especially on a student budget. Also, I adored desserts and had no intention of giving them up! So, I decided to take my sweet-tooth destiny into my own hands and start some serious vegan baking!

It wasn’t easy. Like everything else in life, you have to work hard. As with most ‘conventional baking’, vegan baking has quite a lot of specific rules that you have to follow without exception. I feel that, in some cases, it has more in common with chemistry than it does with intuitive cooking! But, what I love about it is the unpredictability, the excitement, the anticipation and the burst of joy that one feels when an experiment bakes into a tasty and beautiful thing! And I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity to share some of my discoveries with the world. I feel honoured.

There are various possible reasons why you decided to give this book a try. You might be fed up with the heavy feeling in your stomach after eating a regular dessert. You might be allergic to dairy or eggs but don’t want to miss out on eating tasty desserts. You could be vegan for ethical reasons and your new year’s resolution is to test your talent in baking. Maybe you want to lose weight, or you might just be curious to see how on earth you can bake a delicious dessert with ‘nothing’…

Well, let me tell you, this ‘nothing’ that I use in making cakes are actually so many, so delicious and so healthy that the list will leave you speechless!

The reason I would encourage every person on this planet – whether vegan or not – to enjoy vegan desserts is the feeling you have after eating a healthy, natural dish that is not loaded with eggs, milk and sugar. Even though I don’t have anything against these ingredients being eaten occasionally (in fact I do object to milk and sugar, but that’s another story), when they are combined in a single dish, and especially when refined flour is used as well, they are quite harmful to the body, and can result in health problems in the long term.

However, taking any regime to extremes, vegan included, won’t do much good for your health or mental wellbeing. What I’ve noticed is that many vegan baking books are guided by one rule – all the recipes have to be vegan. That means they are still full of refined sugar, margarine, highly refined flour and other processed vegan ingredients. So, you opt for not eating any animal products, but you might also put yourself on the path to becoming an unhealthy vegan.

That is why, when testing baking recipes, I am guided by more rules than one. I want my vegan cakes to be healthy; I want them to be made with the best ingredients I can afford; I want them to be organic whenever possible; sweet but not overly sweet; visually appealing but not fussy; perfect in their imperfections; I want them to feed my body; and I want them to feed my soul. These are my eight golden rules. If most of them are met, the result will be a gorgeous homemade cake that no one will ever say ‘no’ to. Try and you’ll see!

Now let’s look at the ingredients used in healthy vegan baking, my way.

Essential vegan baking ingredients

FLOURS

As the essential ingredient in baking, flour makes a big difference in successful dessert-making so carefully choose the best kind available. Buy organic brands that are unbleached and not treated with chemicals. Store them in airtight containers to prevent bugs and moths having a feast. Do not substitute plain/all-purpose flour for wholemeal/ whole-wheat flour if not stated in the recipe, as the latter has more bran and is heavier both in structure and taste. Quality and protein percentages vary from brand to brand and from season to season. This might result in baking problems and, even if the recipe works really well once, there is no guarantee it will work so well next time if you are using a different brand of flour. Don’t get scared! I’ll talk more about this in the troubleshooting section on pages 16–17.

Unbleached plain/all-purpose flour

I use this type of flour most often since it makes a great base for almost any flour combination, and I would recommend using at least 60% of this type of flour in cake mixtures and bread dough to get a good texture and rise. It can be replaced with unbleached spelt flour if you prefer spelt to wheat. In emergencies, you can use bleached flour instead.

Wholemeal/whole-wheat flour

Robust and full-flavoured, wholemeal/whole-wheat flour contains – besides starch and protein – vitamins, fibre and minerals from the wheat’s bran and germ. It has a shorter shelf-life, which is a good sign, but moths love it, so keep it tightly stored. If you live in a hot climate, keep it refrigerated. In baking, using entirely wholemeal/whole-wheat flour usually results in a heavy, dense and nutty texture and flavour which isn’t usually what we want for a cake. A small percentage (up to 15%) added to the unbleached flour, however, will give a great texture and add flavour to any cake mixture or dough.

Fine cornmeal

There seems to be some confusion between the terms cornflour, cornmeal and cornstarch in British and American English. By cornmeal I mean yellow flour made out of dried corn kernels that is finely ground and used in baking, mixed with other flours. It should not be very coarse (like polenta) and it should not be a completely white powder (like cornflour/cornstarch). Cornmeal is quite heavy and dense, so I never use it on its own. It makes lovely sweet-tasting breads and gives a nice yellow colour to pie and tart crusts. Cornflour/cornstarch is used as a thickener (see page 15).

Other flours and grain products

There are always a couple more types of flour and grain products stored in my cupboard, waiting to be used. Spelt flour is nice to have for variety and when you wish to lessen the gluten content in baking. Sometimes a dough might ask for more protein, for example in bread, so having strong/ bread flour is also good. Chestnut flour is a treat and I use it for special occasions to make delicious Castagnaccio (page 32). Semolina/farina is a type of ground wheat, completely white and mostly used to make semolina pudding, not as a flour. But I found some interesting ways for using it in baking and I hope you will like the taste and texture of those desserts as much as I do! Couscous is also a wheat product, more coarsely ground than semolina, and yellowish in colour. It gives a great crunch to cookies!

Filo/phyllo pastry are paper-thin sheets made out of flour and water and used for making all kinds of baked delicacies, especially in Middle Eastern and Balkan cuisines. My baking is somewhat influenced by the latter, so you will find a couple of interesting, exotic and very tasty desserts made with this dough. Don’t be afraid of it and try each filo/phyllo recipe at least once – you’ll be surprised how tasty and easy they are!

Clockwise from top left: Chestnut flour, wholemeal/whole-wheat flour, unbleached plain/all-purpose flour, couscous, cornmeal

Left to right: Agave syrup, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, barley malt, Demerara sugar

SWEETENERS

How to make desserts sweet and still be classed as healthy is one of the great mysteries. It can be done, but any answer I or some other cookbook author offers will probably be a potential topic for debate. What I have realized is that, especially in the United States, one healthy sweetener takes the throne and is revered until a controversy breaks out and another, ‘healthier’ sweetener takes the stage, then another and so on. In my opinion, the truth lies somewhere in between.

We all know processed foods are not good for us. At all. White sugar is one of the most refined foods available, and I never ever use it in my kitchen and avoid eating any food that contains it. This is not easy, as processed sugar is hiding everywhere; peeping from every can, every jar and every bread basket!

The sweeteners that I’m suggesting are the ones available to me and those that I have tested over the years, paying attention to how I felt after eating desserts sweetened with these rather than highly refined sugar. I have become quite sensitive to refined sugar over time and feel hot, restless and unfocussed when I eat it. I encourage you to test my method and see the difference for yourself: stop eating anything with refined sugar for a period of 30 days and then ‘treat’ yourself with a piece of your usual sugary cake. You should notice the bitter taste that sugary creams have and how afterwards your mouth feels weird and you need to brush your teeth immediately. For me, sugar acts like a mild poison, and I feel happy to have realized that early enough in life to stop my sugar addiction. That’s right, eating sugar becomes an addiction; it’s a relatively new addiction that is socially acceptable and encouraged by the media. It’s a gazillion-dollar business that throws people into diabetes, obesity, high blood-pressure problems and nervous breakdowns. It makes children irritable, hyperactive and naughty. It is slowly destroying our bodies by ‘eating’ all the calcium we get from other foods, causing osteoporosis on all seven continents. If these facts shock you, it’s a good start. Maybe I will reach some of you and you’ll think over your daily abuse of sugar and try to make changes in your diet.

I don’t want to induce a fear of any food, not even sugar. It will not harm you if you have a piece of cake with sugar once a month, but if you have a cup of coffee with sugar in it for breakfast, eat a sandwich with white bread for lunch, drink two cups of juice during the day, and cook pasta with canned tomato sauce for dinner, it’s likely that you are eating too much of it. And that’s without even having a sweet treat!

Having said this, I do use some types of unrefined sugars if other sweeteners will not work as well. This is the case in cake frostings where finely ground, unrefined Demerara sugar replaces icing/ confectioners’ sugar to make a fluffy buttercream. It cannot be done with rice or agave syrup. Or, for example, in some cookie recipes, where I want a crunchy texture that cannot be achieved with liquid sweeteners. Also, unrefined sugars taste sweeter than liquid sweeteners, so if I’m making a cocoa cake mixture, I need more sweetness to make up for the bitterness of the cocoa powder.

Apart from these mentioned cases, if you wish to swap one sweetener stated in a recipe for another, feel free to do so and see what happens. Many vegan recipes warn you that other liquid contents in the recipe have to be reduced if you decide to use rice syrup instead of sugar. I don’t think that is true. I have made cake after cake where I have swapped the sugar for brown rice syrup and not changed anything else, and they always came out great. But if it doesn’t work for you, there might be other factors at play. I’ll discuss that in the troubleshooting section on pages 16–17.

Brown rice syrup

I consider brown rice syrup to be the best choice out of all existing sweeteners. Maybe it’s because of my background as a macrobiotic chef, but it might also be that it really is the best! Desserts made with it always have a mild taste and are soothing and comforting as opposed to the aggressive taste of conventional sweets. However, there are rice syrups and rice syrups on the market, so to make your shopping easier, here are a few guidelines on how to recognize a good one.

The highest-quality brands of rice syrup (sometimes called rice malt syrup) are traditionally made by a slow, natural enzymatic process out of whole grains. The complex carbohydrates that rice syrup consists of are slowly digested and provide us with stable energy instead of being absorbed immediately and causing rapid surges in blood sugar levels.

Read the labels. If sprouted barley is among the ingredients, the syrup can be used daily. Being thick, somewhat darker and of a slightly distinctive taste, it might not work in every recipe, so have a jar of light brown rice syrup in your kitchen as well. Just be careful to buy organic brands that do not have sugar listed as one of the ingredients!

Barley malt

This is a high-quality sweetener you will find in only one or two recipes in this book, as it has quite a strong taste and is too heavy to be used in desserts you might want to offer to wide audiences. But it’s good to have it around and use it in teas, healing hot lemonades, porridges or when making Grissini with Caraway Seeds (see page 120)! It can also be used in pie or cookie doughs, if you don’t mind its taste and the dark colour of the resultant baked goodies.

Pure maple syrup

Maple syrup is another good-quality sweetener that, apart from tasting sweet, is rich in trace minerals which act as antioxidants, keep your heart healthy and support your immune system. When shopping for maple syrup, search for pure and organic types that are dark in colour. Make sure there is no added sugar or colouring in the ingredients. I use it in richer cake mixtures and in nut-rich desserts, as well as in many cookie recipes. It gives a deep and rich taste.

Corn and tofu pie Made with olive oil and soy milk in place of butter and cows’ milk

Agave syrup (or nectar)

A highly controversial sweetener, this has been glorified and frowned upon over and over in the past couple of years. Its visual similarity to honey, its strong, sweet taste and its availability in many food stores has made it quite popular and widely used. It is high in fructose and is quite processed but sometimes you have to make a choice between a bad sweetener (refined sugar) and one that is better, but not ideal at all (in this case, agave syrup). I would put rice and maple syrup highly above it, quality-wise, but if you’re in good health, occasional use should not do much harm. Overuse, however, could. Feel free to substitute it with brown rice or maple syrup in each and every one of my recipes. Sometimes its strong, sweet taste is necessary, but if the dessert is slightly less sweet, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t want to judge agave syrup, but it’s important to know the facts and make informed choices. I feel fine using it from time to time but I use the other sweeteners listed much more often.

Unrefined sugars

In cases where there is no substitution possible (as mentioned on page 10), I try to find the best-quality, organic, unrefined sugar that will work well in a specific vegan baking recipe. You might have a better choice, so pick the best one you can. I use Demerara, muscovado and sometimes, if I can get hold of it, sucanat (whole cane sugar). Sugar is sugar, but the unrefined varieties are more wholesome than the highly processed ones, containing minerals and trace elements and taking a little longer to digest.

OILS

Oils play an important role in baking but I use them in smaller amounts than most vegan baking recipes ask for. It’s good to think about the dessert you’re going to make first and then choose which oil to use, as some oils carry a strong taste that might interfere with other ingredients. Organic, cold-pressed oils are my preferred choice, and even though they are more expensive than highly refined oils, I try to save money on other things and not on the quality of the oil I use daily! There are many other kinds of oil you could use apart from those listed below, depending on what is available to you.

Sunflower oil