Vegan alternatives to butter

[jhob]

This month I am experimenting with going vegetarian, which I strongly suspect will be a permanent change.  My diet was already 90% vegetarian anyway and we'd stopped eating ruminants months ago.  So the switch to full-on veggie isn't huge.  There's nothing I've really missed so far.

I am also trying to be as vegan as I can too and exploring possible vegan options.  I'm pretty sorted with milk (oat milk in tea/coffee and on cereal is fine) but I am really struggling with butter alternatives.  I love butter and I do miss it and have for a long time disliked all margarines I've come across, the smell more than anything.

Is there a decent vegan alternative butter than even tastes some way like it?

The only other option I've liked so far is dipping bread in olive oil, which is nice, but very different.

Oh yeah, cheese.  Is there such a thing as good vegan cheese?

[hellymedic]

I was going to suggest the olive oil for bread but you got there first. It's different but not 

Most margarines are rank IMO, and best avoided.

Nut butters don't taste like dairy either but are palatable and can waterproof your sandwich bread.

[T42]

My wife was vegan for 10 years, but had to give it up because she developed a strong reaction to soy.  She did try other things for a while but they had unpleasant intestinal effects, so she now eats fish and milk products but doesn't use milk itself.

Just asked: she never really found an alternative to cheese, but says there are lots of recipes based on yeast, cashews & so forth.  I guess it's like homoeopathy - it'll work if you believe very, very hard and don't think of the word Wensleydale.

WRT marge we get some stuff from St. Hubert with Omega 3 writ large on the lid.  It's OK but it's far from being butter.

[vorsprung]

Vegan cheese on toast can be simulated by speading marmite and tahini on toast.  Lots of Tahini, a little marmite.  Grill it a bit more.
Bite into it and for about a millisecond it tastes a bit like how you remember cheese on toast tasting

[T42]

Cheddar, Stilton, Camembert, Roquefort, Brie, Grana, Tilsit, Cantal... and tahini with marmite. Oh, the humanity.

[fuaran]

Oh the humanity of actually giving a fuck about how animals are treated?

[jhob]

Thanks, I will give some nut butters and that St Hubert stuff a go... assuming they don't have the other ethical dilemma of being made with palm oil.

Are either readily available from the supermarket or am I going to have to do a bit more hunting?

I have also come across this recipe for vegan butter which I am going to give a go.

[hellymedic]

Sainsbury's website lists peanut (obv) cashew, almond and coconut butters.

Meridian almond butter contains no palm oil.
Whole Earth Three Nut butter contains 'sustainable' palm oli.

[Kim]

(Disclaimer: I'm a carnivore, but I've spent plenty of time with vegans and lactose-intolerant people.)

Is there a decent vegan alternative butter than even tastes some way like it?

'Pure' is a decent enough margarine, but I tend to think of margarine as an industrial lubricant rather than a food, and I can get through life quite happily without butter.

Oh yeah, cheese.  Is there such a thing as good vegan cheese?

Not unless you want to make a high-temperature gasket for something, judging by attempts at cheese on toast.

I remember one that had an uncanny resemblance to cheetah poo, but probably a lot less calcium.  I wasn't brave enough to taste it.


TBH, I reckon the key to successful vegan food is to either be the sort of person who lives on baked beans & chips anyway, or to have been on a vegan diet for long enough that you forget how poor these substitutes really are, and not really make a habit of them.  Better to cook real food that happens not to have any diary in it that try to find acceptable soya-based plastics to fill the gap.

[jsabine]

Oh the humanity of actually giving a fuck about how animals are treated?

Ach, if god had meant us to be vegan, she wouldn't have made animals out of meat.

[rafletcher]

Oh the humanity of actually giving a fuck about how animals are treated?

In which case, why bother simulating foods that you no longer eat? Never understood vegan "cheese" or vegetarian "mince".

Sorry to OP, that's OT and for another place.

If you don't want to eat oil based margarines (I only ever use them for sandwiches, and there I only use a small amount so don't really notice the taste/smell - I use the Bertorelli one atm) I think you'll find it difficult to find a viable alternative to butter.  Just do as most continentals do and manage without it on bread most of the time.

[mrcharly-YHT]

tbh, I think that once you've been without dairy for a while, it will start to smell rank.

I used to be a real dairy-monster. Would happily drink cream, eat lumps of butter, kilos of cheese. For the sake of my furring arteries I completely gave it up for a while; after about 2-3months I found even the smell of butter off-putting.

I eat a bit of cheese again, but I couldn't face eating it in quantity. Just really doesn't appeal.

[jhob]

Oh the humanity of actually giving a fuck about how animals are treated?

In which case, why bother simulating foods that you no longer eat? Never understood vegan "cheese" or vegetarian "mince".

Sorry to OP, that's OT and for another place.

If you don't want to eat oil based margarines (I only ever use them for sandwiches, and there I only use a small amount so don't really notice the taste/smell - I use the Bertorelli one atm) I think you'll find it difficult to find a viable alternative to butter.  Just do as most continentals do and manage without it on bread most of the time.

I think such foods can be helpful by way of transition.  For example we make a vegetarian cottage pie using quorn mince, because cottage pie was a meal we enjoyed and we can make a very tasty veggie alternative using it.  It doesn't taste like mince, but it does taste nice.

It may well be that we give that up in time but for now it's nice to be able to keep some of the essence of our previous eating habits, rather than make a big jump all at once.

[hellymedic]

(Disclaimer: I'm a carnivore, but I've spent plenty of time with vegans and lactose-intolerant people.)

TBH, I reckon the key to successful vegan food is to either be the sort of person who lives on baked beans & chips anyway, or to have been on a vegan diet for long enough that you forget how poor these substitutes really are, and not really make a habit of them.  Better to cook real food that happens not to have any diary in it that try to find acceptable soya-based plastics to fill the gap.

+1

I'm another omnivore.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Oh the humanity of actually giving a fuck about how animals are treated?

In which case, why bother simulating foods that you no longer eat? Never understood vegan "cheese" or vegetarian "mince".

Because sausages and cheese and spag bol are tasty, and if you can find a non-animal substitute, you can have things you like but without the flesh?

[Biggsy]

If animal welfare is the reason, you could keep a goat and treat it like a king queen.  Perhaps the sale of the lawnmower would pay for her.

A vegan margarine I tried recently (by accident, away from home) was indeed

[hellymedic]

I have used mayonnaise instead of butter at times, and quite like it on bread.
It wasn't a vegan mayo though and I have no experience of vegan mayo.

As I wrote upthread, I'm not a vegan but we use next to no butter now.

We put mostly things on bread without it. For myself, I'd prefer humous, olive oil, or tahini on my bread without any 'butter-a-like'.

[Kim]

If animal welfare is the reason, you could keep a goat and treat it like a king queen.  Perhaps the sale of the lawnmower would pay for her.

I only have limited experience of goats, and most of that is from a sysadmin's perspective, but my understanding is that in that scenario the only thing you can reasonably expect the goat not to eat is the lawn...

[jhob]

If animal welfare is the reason, you could keep a goat and treat it like a king queen.  Perhaps the sale of the lawnmower would pay for her.

A vegan margarine I tried recently (by accident, away from home) was indeed

For me I initially gave up beef and lamb (and goats, being ruminants) because of the methane emissions.  I seriously cut down on cheese at the same time as that is almost as bad for emissions as just eating the meat.  Milk, on the other hand isn't so bad in comparison.

But it all got me thinking a bit more about why I eat what I eat...  Which led me down the animal welfare track that I really wasn't happy eating pig meat either as they are rather more sentient and aware creatures than I was comfortable eating (I wouldn't eat a dog for exactly those reasons and could not justify to myself why a pig was any different, other than that I liked bacon), which in my normal diet just about leaves poultry...

...which led me to thinking about what happens to all the males chickens/turkeys that aren't reared for meat/eggs, answer being that they are killed at birth.... and then I started thinking about how many animals must die because I choose to eat meat, even when I wasn't even eating that much of it.... which led me to thinking about the whole scale of the mass-processing of meat/dairy/eggs and the sheer numbers of animals that must be raised to sustain us (when you start realising that milk in particular makes its way into so many products, considering how much milk must be farmed just for one supermarket and multiplying that up to all the supermarkets in the county... country... world...).... and thinking that I didn't really want to be a part of that... then to thinking about the whole land use argument and that something like 20% of global CO2 emissions are attributable to ruminants bred for their products. 

Which is where I am today, trying out being a vegetarian/vegan-lite to see how I like it and how I feel about it all... ultimately to decide where my ethics on all this lie and where on the scale I'm happy to settle.

[ian]

A world without cheese? The horror... the horror...

[geraldc]

Vegan mayo as a butter substitute?

[hellymedic]

Vegan mayo as a butter substitute?

Great minds...

[rogerzilla]

SO likes Pure margarine of the olive variety. Sold in most Sainsbury's.  Vegan cheese is notoriously horrid although it can sometimes be OK as a minor ingredient.  The Alpro soya single cream is OK but there's a very slight vegetable aftertaste.  She likes Rude Health "milk" best although the Alpro original almond milk is OK and so is the Koko coconut stuff.  The unsweetened Alpro almond milk is rank - it's like drinking milk of magnesia, or kaolin and morphine mixture 

[Ben T]

I'm actually now a vegan but *not* a vegetarian. i.e. I don't eat animal products, but I do eat meat.

[Ben T]

Alpro unsweetened is nice mixed with things like into cashew cream, protein shakes (half and half with water) and tastes no different in porridge.
But is rank in coffee and tea.