What if I want to un-vegan a recipe? - And other tips to stop playing by the rules.
I am going to start adding to this blog post as I find and think of ways to adjust recipe to taste, availability of ingredients, adjusting for the non-vegan (which is also me), and other insights around how to make cooking less strict.
If a recipe calls for a plant based milk, you can use cow milk instead. 2% would probably work the best. Equal amounts as needed. This also goes for using dairy butter or yogurt instead of a plant based butter or yogurt. Same with dairy sour cream and cottage cheese. I like to define these products as being diary (animal based, come from cows or goats) products rather than “real”. As the plant based product selections have increased and more people are adopting them into their diets, what is “real” or one person is not “real” to another. Dairy, in my mind, helps define the product more completely.
Using dairy parmesan or other cheese instead of nutritional yeast or plant based cheese is also okay. Many vegan recipes that use nutritional yeast are trying to get that umami flavor commonly found in parmesan into the recipe. Depending on a person’s level of comfort and opinion surrounding how much processing goes into making plant based dairy alternatives, one could ease into veganizing an older recipe using nutritional yeast, or un-vegan one by using dairy parmesean.