Vegan Cooking

When facing an evening that involves cooking for a vegan, even professional cooks can face a struggle in deciding what to prepare for the main dish and accompaniments that make up a proper meal. There follows a few useful rules to assist you during the process of cooking meals for vegan diners:

So, First Question - What Does Vegan Mean?

Many people get confused between vegan and vegetarianism. While a vegetarian typically steers clear of all meat and fish products, vegans shun all animal AND animal by-products as well. Meat by-products include dairy products. Any product that comes from animals must be left out when cooking for vegans.

Preparation

Whether you are making one meal or ten, preparing meals for vegans needs great planning. It is essential for each meal to be tasty AND nutritious, which is often a problem for the chef who is used to using non-vegan food products in meals. The courses should be prepared early in the process, considering the best way to to include iron, protein, fiber, and taste to the vegan meal.

Advanced planning is easier if you can find a good online recipe collection with a good variety of vegan recipes. Even so, you need to check each of the recipes carefully before utilising them. Sadly, a few recipes described as vegan are far from it. Sadly, some folk have very different perspectives of what 'vegan' actually means. Nevertheless, if you do a little work many of these vegan recipes are exceedingly flavorsome and highly healthy. Some may require special ingredients, but again, the internet can be a great help in tracking these down. You may actually find online retailers of vegan food stuffs, which, as they are normally 'specialists' in the being vegan, can even be able to give advice on alternative ingredients for your vegan menu.

Introducing Variety

When cooking vegan meals, it is all too easy to make unexciting dishes that seem similar to one another. This is not necessary. As A Matter Of Fact, vegan dinners can be as interesting as those cooked in meat based cooking. With the large number of soy alternatives to dairy and meat dishes, you can use substitutions for foods from chicken to mince, which helps to introduce a great deal of flavor and variety to the feast.

Check Everything

As the main chef for a vegan dinner party, your main task is to be utterly certain you are meeting your diners' beliefs. It would be all too simple, as well as less time consuming, to just assume that all non-meat items are safe for vegans and cook a meal based on that. However, a good chef will take the time to read through the ingredient lists of all items appearing in the recipe so you can be utterly sure the food is OK for vegans. You will discover some surprising places that meat products and assocaited by-products crop up, for example:

• Refined Sugar: About 50 percent of the sugar processing plants in the US use carbon from animal sources to filter the sugar. Consequently, many vegans avoid processed sugar.

• Gelatin: Most people do not realize that gelatin is derived from meat or fish.

• Vegetable Soups: Many tinned vegatable soups are have chicken or beef stock in their ingredients.

• Breads and Pastries: The danger list here includes eggs, milk, and animal fats..

• Worcestershire Sauce: This sauce is made using anchovies, though vegetarian alternatives are available.

Honoring these tips, any chef can prepare a meal that is a delight for carnivores and vegans as well, and your vegan friends will no doubt thank you for your consideration.