How to Make Any Recipe Vegan (Without Just Removing Things)

Going vegan with a recipe isn't about deletion. Remove the eggs from a cake and you don't get a vegan cake — you get a flat, gummy mess. The fat, the structure, the moisture: all of it needs to go somewhere. The good news is that once you understand what each ingredient is doing, the swaps become obvious.

Eggs: the hardest swap, but not as hard as people think

Eggs do several different jobs depending on the recipe. Before you swap, ask which job the egg is doing.

Binding (holding ingredients together — burgers, meatballs, cookies): use a flax egg. Mix 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed with 3 tablespoons of water, let it sit for 5 minutes until it goes gelatinous. It won't taste of anything and works in almost every baked good or patty.

Leavening (making things rise — cakes, muffins): use aquafaba. That's the liquid from a can of chickpeas. Three tablespoons equals one egg. Whip it for meringues. Use it unwhipped in batters. It sounds absurd until you try it.

Moisture (keeping things from drying out): unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana both work, using a quarter cup per egg. They add a faint flavour, so use them where that won't clash — banana in banana bread, applesauce in spiced muffins.

Richness (custards, quiches, scrambles): silken tofu blended smooth, or a mix of cornstarch and plant milk. Neither is perfect, but both get you somewhere reasonable.

Butter: easier than you'd expect

Butter is mostly fat with a little water and milk solids. For most recipes, a 1:1 swap with a good vegan block butter (like Miyoko's or Flora) works perfectly. The milk solids matter more than you'd think for browning, so don't expect identical results when you're making brown butter or caramel — but for baking, spreading, and sautéing, you won't notice.

For baking specifically, coconut oil is a solid alternative — use the same quantity. Refined coconut oil has no coconut flavour. Unrefined does. Know which you want before you open the jar.

For sautéing and cooking, olive oil works fine. Use about three-quarters the amount (butter is ~80% fat; olive oil is ~100%).

Milk: the easiest one

Swap 1:1 with any unsweetened plant milk. Oat milk is the most neutral and works in almost everything. Soy milk has the closest protein content to dairy, which matters if you're making something like a béchamel that needs to thicken. Almond milk is thinner and slightly sweet — fine for pancakes, less ideal for savoury sauces.

Full-fat coconut milk (from a can, not the carton) substitutes for heavy cream. It adds flavour, but in curries and soups that's usually a feature.

Cheese: the honest answer

Hard cheese (parmesan, pecorino) — use nutritional yeast. Two to three tablespoons in pasta or on pizza gives you the umami and saltiness you're looking for. It's not cheese, but it fills the same role in a dish.

Soft cheese (ricotta, cream cheese) — cashew-based versions are the best commercially available option. Blended soaked cashews with lemon juice and a pinch of salt also works if you want to make your own.

Melting cheese — this is where vegan options still lag. Most vegan mozzarella melts but goes oily and rubbery. Violife and Miyoko's are the best of a mediocre field. For pizza, a thin layer works; for a cheese-pull lasagne, manage your expectations.

The things that don't need swapping at all

A lot of recipes are already mostly vegan and just need a few tweaks. Tomato-based pasta sauces, vegetable curries, stir-fries, grain bowls, most soups — these often use butter or cream as a finishing touch, not a structural ingredient. Swap those and you're done in thirty seconds.

The difficulty of making a recipe vegan scales with how central animal products are to its structure. A béarnaise sauce is almost entirely eggs and butter — that's a hard problem. A mushroom risotto that finishes with a knob of butter and parmesan is ten seconds of work.

Why this matters for cooking

The mental shift is from "what do I remove?" to "what is this ingredient doing, and what else does that job?" Once you have that framework, you stop looking up substitution charts for every recipe and start making judgment calls on the fly.

That's where the cooking gets easier — and more interesting.