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February 2002 From the Pros: The Secrets of Vegan Baking By Livia Alexander

On a recent trip to San Francisco I went to satisfy my appetite for exquisite vegetarian cuisine by dining at the Millennium restaurant near the Civic Center. The food was, as always, excellent; but it was the dessert that really blew me away. A thin crispy cannoli shell filled with a velvety peanut butter cream, warm glazed bananas, cherries soaked in port, and a scoop of banana sorbet. Simply divine!

With new products on the market and talented pastry chefs who continuously develop and perfect their trade, vegan desserts have become a refreshing—competitive even—item in the annals of sweet cravings. Recently, vegan baking has been making inroads into mainstream cooking schools. Here in New York, vegan baking courses offered at The Institute of Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School) by Fran Costigan, vegan pastry chef and author of Great Good Desserts Naturally! (Good Cakes Publications, 1999), sold out instantly. Interestingly, most vegan pastry chefs have gained their experience and professional training in conventional baking. This experience has provided them with a strong foundation from which to understand the art of baking which they then apply to their vegan desserts.

While conventional baking employs eggs, butter and cream, vegan chefs, for the most part, rely on natural ingredients, such as coconut and canola oils, soy and nut milks, maple syrup, and seaweed thickeners like kuzu and agar. Amy Pearce, the brilliant pastry chef at Millennium, has used unconventional ingredients, such as red pepper juice and avocado, to craft new desserts that never stop stunning. To create the shells for the peanut butter cannoli, Amy had to find an alternative way to make the tuile: a thin wafer biscuit rolled up into a hollow tube-like shape while still hot out of the oven. Instead of using the traditional egg whites that give the wafer the necessary malleability, Amy found that guar gum, a seaweed, has the desired coagulant quality that makes the shell malleable while hot, and hard when it cools down. To achieve the creamy quality of the peanut butter filling, Amy combines her own peanut butter with cocoa butter, which is basically the fatty element of chocolate.

A glance at the specialty cakes made by Vedika Webb, owner of Lotus Cake Studio, proves that vegan desserts can not only taste good, but also look wonderful. For example, her Daisy Cake was made to match the dress of a birthday girl. The dressmaker gave Vedika a sample of the yellow satin dress, which had a lace pattern that was decorated with staggered pearls, daisies, and other flowers. Vedika also concocts an Espresso Cake out of chocolate cake layers brushed with espresso syrup, filled and iced with espresso buttercream. She then decorates the cake with modeled marzipan coffee beans and a gold-dusted rose with leaves. In the same vein, Laura Gaines, founder of Cake: Organic Baking, offers a decadent chocolate cake with a rich chocolate-coconut ganache icing gorgeously wrapped in a thin chocolate band and topped with little truffle gems.

The key to vegan desserts, according to Myra Kornfeld, author of The Voluptuous Vegan (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2000), is to acknowledge that vegan sweets do taste different. Vegan pastry chefs might be able to create a puff pastry that would act the same way as a conventional one, but when using a different set of ingredients, one must realize that the taste, by definition, will not be exactly the same. Some would even argue that it is superior! Using whole-wheat flours, Kornfeld adds, lends itself better to other whole ingredients, such as maple sugar, coconut or canola oil, and not to butter and refined sugar. However, to try to make a soufflé, a classic French dessert that is practically a celebration of eggs, would be simply impossible. Obviously, eggs and butter have distinct functions and tastes that cannot be mimicked by alternative ingredients.

One of the major challenges facing the vegan pastry chef is how to bake without eggs. Eggs have as many as eight different functions in baking, including binding, leavening, structure, color, taste, and moisture. Shaphan Laos, the owner of the organic Rising Sun Bakery in Taos, New Mexico, found that overcooked mashed white beans is a good substitute for eggs and helps him keep his baked goods very moist. Alternatively, he uses Ener-G Egg Replacer, another highly recommended brand among chefs, which includes a combination of tapioca and potato flours. Another important technique in vegan baking is to add an acid, such as vinegar or lemon juice, to cake batters to help in the leavening process in the absence of eggs.

Desserts are not something one eats for their nutritional value, but for pleasure. Even the most balanced of diets can include a degree of sweet indulgence, which in the best of all worlds should not include ingredients harmful to your body. A “healthier cookie” would perhaps be made with whole-wheat flour and alternative sweeteners (maple syrup or sugar, fruit juice, malt, rice syrup, etc.), and would not contain hydrogenated oils. As Amy Mastronardi of Hippie Chick Bakery explained to me, those ingredients are more complex carbohydrates, meaning it takes the body longer to digest them and you do not get that sugar rush. The sugars and flour also have more nutrients because they have not been refined as much. While some find this type of baking preferable for its wholesome quality, Amy feels that it comes at the expense of flavor by frequently creating heavier and less delicate desserts.
The use of hydrogenated oils is a particularly contested issue. Various chefs avoid hydrogenated oils at all costs, while others find them indispensable. Vedika Webb uses a combination of organic non-hydrogenated oil shortening and organic vegan hydrogenated margarine to create her frostings. This is necessary not only to give the cake a buttery flavor but, more importantly, to give it the stability required for multi-tiered wedding cakes. Vedika adds that using shortening alone would also make the cake look exceptionally bright and unnatural looking. The pale ivory color resulting from the combination of the two fats allows for better photographs of the cake, an issue important to many couples.

For the most part, vegan chefs are attuned to the nutritional aspects of their ingredients and prefer to use only non-hydrogenated fats. Alongside more traditional oils, such as pure olive oil and canola oil, new oils have become a staple of vegan baking. Safflower oil, a highly unsaturated oil, carries no flavor and is therefore a favorite choice of Jorge Pineda of the Candle Café. Another oil that stands out is coconut butter, also known as coconut oil. A medium chain saturated fat, coconut butter does not raise blood cholesterol levels and is rich in lauric acid which is very healthy for the body.

Various nut milks are also crucial in vegan baking. The milks provide not only moisture, but also fat that is good for baking. Vita Soy is almost unanimously the favorite brand of soymilk for its creamy consistency and least beany flavor. Matteo Silverman of Whole Earth Bakery recommends using nut milks, such as almond or cashew, that you can easily make at home by blending together one part nuts with two parts water. While cashew milk can be used as is, almond and other nut milks must first be strained through a cheesecloth to get rid of the mealy residue. Laura Gains finds almond and cashew milks especially great when making cream fillings, ice cream and chocolate pudding.

For the home cook taking his or her first steps down the adventurous road of vegan baking, more information is becoming increasingly available, especially on the Web and in new cookbooks. Fran Costigan’s book includes a detailed and informative introduction to the principles and ingredients of vegan baking. Myra Kornfeld’s Voluptuous Vegan, Eric Tucker’s The Millennium Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, 1998), and Peter Berley’s The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen (HarperCollins, 2000) all include tempting dessert recipes. Candle Café’s cookbook is scheduled for publication in the coming year. Surprisingly, even mainstream cooking magazines often include dairy-free desserts; just keep your eyes open. And last, but not least, let your imagination run free and spoil that sweet tooth of yours. You deserve it!

Livia Alexander holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Cinema Studies and currently teaches at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Pastry Chefs and Bakeries

Jorge Penada, Candle Café, 1307 3 Ave., New York; (212) 472-0970; www.candlecafe.com.
Fran Costigan, For Goodness Cakes, private catering; vegiecake@aol.com; Fax: (212) 566-3243.
Laura Gaines, Cake: Organic Baking, specializes in wedding, specialty and celebration cakes; (212) 229-7863; boonah@att.net; www.pastryprincess.com.
LifeThyme, 410 6 Ave., New York; (212) 420-9099.
Amy Mastronardi and Carl Neunaber, Hippie Chick Bakery, mail orders available; (978) 388-6644; hippiechickbakery@hotmail.com; www.hippiechickbakery.com.
Matteo Silverman, private catering; (212) 894-3749 x7882 (voicemail/fax); chefmatteo@onebox.com.
Vedika Webb, Lotus Cake Studio: wedding, specialty, and celebration cakes; (215) 848-8770; lotuscakestudio@mac.com; http://lotuscakestudio.n3.net.
Whole Earth Bakery & Kitchen, 130 St. Marks Pl., New York; (212) 677-7597.

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