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Cooking Meals For Vegans

1st February, 2009 - Posted by health news - No Comments

When approached by a situation that involves cooking for a vegan, even expert cooks can face a struggle in deciding how best to cook for the main dishes and side dishes that make up a proper meal. There follows a few useful guidelines to aid you in the process of cooking for vegan diners:

What is a Vegan?
Many people get confused between vegan and vegetarianism. While a vegetarian typically avoids all meat products, vegans avoid all meat AND any associated by-products as well. Such by-products include milk, honey and many other unexpected items. Any item that is derived from an animal should be left out when preparing food for vegans.

Plan Ahead
Whether you are preparing one dinner or ten, fixing meals for vegans involves real preparation. It is vital for each meal to be full of flavour and nutritionally correct, which often presents difficulties for the cook who is familiar with using non-vegan products in recipes. The meal or meals should be prepared early in the process, considering the best way to to introduce protein, fiber, iron, and flavor to the vegan dinner.

Planning ahead is less problematic if you can find a good on-line recipe collection with a collection of vegan and vegetarian recipes. Even then, you should verify each of the vegan recipes in detail before cooking with them. Some recipes described as vegan are actually not even close. Sadly, some folk have completely different perspectives of what ‘vegan’ really means. However, if you put in the effort most of these vegan recipes are exceedingly flavorsome and extremely nutritive. Some may demand special ingredients, but once again, the net can be a great help in tracking these down. You might even be able to find online sellers of vegan food ingredients, which, as they are usually ‘specialists’ in the being vegan, might even be able to give advice on substitute ingredients for your vegan cooking.

Variety Is the Spice of Life
When cooking vegan meals, it is tempting to make boring dishes that seem similar to one another. This is not necessary. The truth is, vegan meals can be quite similar to those prepared for non-vegan cooking. With the large number of TVP style alternatives to dairy and meat dishes, substitutions can be easily found for foods from beef to sausage, which really helps to introduce a great deal of flavor and variety to the dinner. It may also enable you to use a standard recipe collection, and simply take advantage of vegan alternatives for some of the ingredients. In particular, you may find that many appetizer recipes are vegan without needing any changes

Check Everything
As the main chef for a vegan meal, your first duty is to be absolutely sure you are meeting your vegan guests’ choice of lifestyle. It would be all too simple, as well as a lot quicker, to merely assume that all non-meat items are safe for vegans and cook a recipe based on that. However, a good chef will take the time to check the ingredient lists of all items appearing in the recipe in order to be absolutely sure the food is 100 percent vegan. You will find some unexpected areas that anmial products and their by-products crop up, for example:

• Refined Sugar: About 50 percent of the sugar processing plants in the US use animal-based carbon to filter the sugar. Consequently, many vegans won’t eat refined sugar.
• Gelatin: Most cooks do not realize that gelatin is derived from fish or animal sources.
• Soups: Many vegetable soups are have stock made from beef in their ingredients.
• Bread: Even those that are not made with milk or eggs may contain animal-derived lard.
• Worcestershire Sauce: This ubiquitous sauce is made with anchovies, though vegetarian alternatives are available.

If you stick with these rules, any chef can produce a dinner that is a delight for carnivores and non-meat-eaters alike, and your vegan guests will no doubt thank you for your time and considerate efforts.