Getting Started

Cooking vegan food is no different to cooking other foods. Careful preparation, quality ingredients and the willingness to experiment will bring rewards! There's a few simple recipes to get you started in this part of the web site and any new or unusual ingredients are explained.

The Basics

As with all styles of cooking there are some basic ingredients that get used over and over again. Some of them are obviously vegan, others are not. There are also alternatives to many traditional animal based ingredients. For example use:

• soya milk instead of cows’ milk
• soya cream instead of dairy cream
• vegan margarine instead of other margarines or butter
• golden syrup, date syrup, corn syrup or maple syrup instead of honey
• vegetable stocks, vegan Bouillon or soy sauce instead of beef, chicken or fish stocks

Try looking for new ingredients, recipes or cooking techniques from other cultures. Specialist shops serving ethnic minorities in Britain often have a much wider variety of new foods, combined with lower prices too!

If you’re keen to keep with an “English” diet there are a wide variety of vegan sausages, burgers etc available from health and wholefood shops and some supermarkets. Wholefood shops usually stock a wide variety of foods and basic ingredients suitable for vegans.