I’m trying to teach myself how to cook and I don’t know enough to be able to tell when information on the internet is accurate. I have a box of pancake mix and I’d like to replace the cow milk with some kind of plant milk. The vibe of cooking sites is vaguely spammy, and I can’t tell if they are misinformation or not. Cooking is a high effort activity for me so I need to know if something is mostly going to work before I attempt it.
Where do you go to find information that is accurate and comprehensive?
I usually make stuff from scratch and follow vegan recipes so i don’t have to “veganfy” a recipe. Like my family loves Nora Cooks in general and there is a great nora cooks pancake recipe . We’ve made that as pancakes but usually go the waffle route. It’s pretty easy to make and leftovers are great in airfryer (ok in microwave). We usually make extra and have leftovers for 2-3 days
If i need to do a conversion on the fly i usually just do a quick internet search, check 1-3 sources and go with the consensus. My search is usually “[x] to [y] substitute ratio” or similar.
For your plant milk i would generally go 1:1 but it would depend on the type of plant milk since some is thinner than others. If you can’t find anything specific then do your best guess and treat it like an experiment, take notes, and adjust next time. For your specific case this post seemed fairly detailed, mentions usually 1:1 but goes more in depth. For the things i usually make though 1:1 seems to work fine for our Almond or soy milk.
I know I’m a bit different because I usually enjoy cooking, but in my experience there’s no way to get around experimenting for yourself and building up the “mental image” of how much stuff you have to mix together for everything to work well. Every time I tried following an online recipe it came out wrong in one way or another and I had to learn how adjust for the ingredients and even cookware I have available.
As for your question: for pancakes, I’d say soy milk is my choice, maybe add a bit of extra vegetable oil compared to the regular recipe. If you’re into coconut flavor, then coconut milk would be ideal in terms of texture, but it will overpower everything else taste-wise. Almond milk will probably taste the best but the texture is usually quite dry.
Ayeee, hey, I haven’t bought dairy milk in 15 years, I’ve been cooking from scratch since I was 12. Unless you are trying to whip cream, plant milks go 1:1 with dairy milk in my expierence. In all my baking and cooking, it works. Coconut milk has more fat, I’ve been using almond milk lately. I should switch to to soy, but these work just like dairy milks. I don’t have much expierence with oatmilk, but it’ll do with a pancake mix just fine
If you want “buttermilk” the old trick is a teaspoon of vinegar (or fresh lemon juice) in a glass of milk and you let it sit for 5-10 minutes, and there you have it. This works with the nut milks too!
I hope the pancakes are good!
ps,
Found many fantastic baking (and others!) dishes here :) The Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles are my personal, and now my households, favorite cookie of all time, they’re so good
I’d like to chime in with the recommendation to generally not veganify non-vegan recipes. You are taking a recipe that is designed with ingredients having certain characteristics, and substituting some of those ingredients with slightly different ones. If the original recipe has been tuned to be as close to perfection as possible, then your altered version cannot be as good.
And then again, a recipe designed as vegan from ground up has all the ratios between different ingredients, and the choices of ingredients designed to really fit well together.
My personal experience is that vegan food that is slightly different but takes the best out of the ingredients available can often be better than its non-vegan counterpart. You get better results by at most taking inspiration from the non-vegan foods and then creating something of your own than by trying to do something with altered ingredients.
But of course: This is the way for perfection. It assumes you are a gourmet magician or that you have extremely good recipes available somewhere. It can really often bring you very adequate results to just emulate a non-vegan recipe. I am sorry I am unable to directly help you with that; but I feel it might be useful to you if I tried pushing you a bit towards the direction of making the best of your ingredients and seeing what comes out of that :)
The best vegan foods I have eaten have all been such that you simply couldn’t sensibly make them using any non-vegan ingredients.Good luck cooking, in any case!
