Baking Vegan Bread at Home
by Shane MartinGenres: Cooking / Courses & Dishes / Bread, Cooking / Vegan
Published on March 12, 2024
Pages: 160
Format: eBook, Hardcover Source: Library, Owned
Enjoy the amazing aromas and flavors of homemade vegan breads made entirely with plant-based ingredients, at a fraction of the cost of store-bought vegan breads.
Everyone deserves good homemade bread, but if you are a vegan or have one in your household, it has long been challenging to bake a luscious, earthy plant-based loaf to serve and enjoy, simply because so many breads and flavored breads contain animal products like eggs, milk, cream, and butter. Vegan baking has seen great improvements in recent years, however, and the tide has turned.
In more than 70 recipes that range from the familiar and kid-friendly to the rustic and artisanal, celebrated vegan blogger Shane Martin reveals how fun and delectable it is to bake vegan breads. With everyday sandwich loaves and elegant French- and Italian-inspired artisan rounds and loaves, and with lots of sweet or cheesy filled breads and quick breads, Baking Vegan Bread at Home serves up a feast of honest and healthy homemade goodness. It includes:
- Family-style loaves from whole wheat and white to rye, pumpernickel, and sourdough
- Artisan breads like focaccia, ciabatta, challah, baguettes, and boules
- Amazing flavored breads made with fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, and, best of all, chocolate!
- Muffins, scones, pancakes, waffles, and donuts for breakfast, brunch, or snacks
- Biscuits, buns, rolls, crackers, pitas, pizza doughs, and cornbread
With lots of tips and tricks for making plant-based breads as good as or better than the “originals,” this pathbreaking book will have you baking deeply flavorful and incredibly healthy vegan breads in no time.
I got this from the library and then I bought my own copy.
(That’s the best one line review you can give a cookbook.)
Here’s the longer story. I came upon this book in a roundabout way. I found the sequel to this book (about vegan bread making in a bread machine) on Netgalley. I do like reading Netgalley cookbooks but I don’t have a bread machine so that was a bit too much even for me. I decided to see if there was a previous book that didn’t use a machine. I found it at the library and decided that I wanted to try to make just about every recipe I read.
We aren’t big bread eaters here. Buying bread is tricky. The husband’s major allergen is sesame. Buying bread is stressful!! It used to be just a concern if it was sitting in the same case as bread with sesame seeds on it. Then it was getting the little death sprinkles raining down on it. But no. It has gotten worse when it has supposed to have gotten better. Rant incoming.
With the rise of sesame allergies in the population, labeling was mandated. I was so happy! Sesame is considered a “natural flavor.” Surprise ER trip when not disclosed. That isn’t supposed to happen any more. But what happened instead was that because sesame seeds are so small and hard to clean, is that some very bad companies decided that instead of trying to make sure their products were allergen-free that they would label all their products as sesame contaminated. Are they? Probably not. Could they be? Maybe. Should you risk it?
It leads to me standing in the store staring a packages and trying to decide if companies are lying or not, if I can find a clean labeled alternative, and figuring what else I can make if I can’t. Bread is the worst. Then if I do feed it to him, I spend the next 10 minutes after he eats it holding my breath in case he stops breathing. So you see why just making bread at home can be better for my poor nerves.
It starts with muffins and quick breads. I made the jalapeño cornbread muffins for a coworker with a cornbread muffin obsession. I like my cornbread sweeter and moister than most so these weren’t to my taste but they weren’t bad for a more traditional cornbread. There’s a baked chocolate donut here I want to try too.
There are rolls and loaves that range from everyday staples to the more exotic. I’ve made the herbed pull-apart bread as a test run for Thanksgiving. It worked well. I plan on making that as a garlic bread. (We do pasta instead of a traditional Thanksgiving meal.) There is also an olive and roasted garlic bread that sounds really good but my dad doesn’t like olives. Maybe I’ll just make that for us. There are focaccias and ciabattas and brioches and baguettes. I want to try the No-Knead (Vegan) Cheddar Onion Bread. Do you see why I had to buy my own copy?
All this is even before we get to the sweet loaves.
I’m going to have fun cooking my way through this book.
