Art, craft or science? Why everyone should try vegan baking

Vegan baking has changed the way I look at cooking, for the better. Since I started on this journey of culinary self-improvement I have approached cooking the same way that I do most things: winging it. I find so much joy in getting it wrong and creating something entirely different to what I tried to, but in the best ways possible. I rarely follow recipes and when I do I treat them as suggestions, scrawling my own add-ons in the margins. This stopped working abruptly when I decided to take on the cakes and confectionaries for the cafe.

 I got my kitchen in order, blasted some Stevie Wonder and, with all the hubris I could muster, began improvising. Lemon drizzle? Might as well add lemon juice to make it more moist. Banana bread? Lets add biscoff spread, surely the texture will hold. Eyeballing my baking powder, changing the size of the tins, you name it, I’m winging it. Any good bakers (or even those of you who have picked up a whisk before) from the bottom of my heart, I’m so sorry. The recipe for the lemon drizzle called for a cool 45 minutes baking, there I was 2 hours in, frantically checking the recipe, wondering what could have possibly warranted this monstrosity I had created. How does one burn the crust while the centre is still a wet batter?  I like to think that after 4 years in the industry my culinary intuition has served me pretty well. The building blocks are in place and I feel confident in my ability to cook. But it didn’t feel that way. Staring dumbly at the mess I had made, picturing the conversation I was about to have with my boss, I did what any self-respecting chef does in that situation: I called my mum.

But this is the thing about dairy baking: the rules make sense. I spent the next few hours researching. My deadline loomed but I had a new focus, I wanted to be a good baker. I emerged from the kitchen at 1am, covered in flour and exhausted. Packed away for the morning 8+ cakes, a lemon drizzle, red velvet, banana bread, carrot cake, brownies, flapjacks. I can imagine there’s some people (most people) reading this train wreck with exasperation. Baking is not difficult. Somehow in all my time cooking,  I could count the times I had made cakes and confectionaries on one hand. A baffling realisation, but one that I immediately realised was holding me back as a creative. 

And this was the attitude I had moving forward. Cooking became less of an art and more of, as Bourdain says, a craft. I had an appreciation that the craft could be art. I loved the consistency, a different experience than cooking to be sure, but not laborious as I expected it to be. I began getting the hang of the logic behind recipes and they started to come easily. My favourite realisation was that I had plonked a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda in place of a teaspoon of baking soda. Inexcusable, but a little bit funny.

As I grew in confidence experimentation was beginning to be a possibility. Understanding the fundamentals allowed me to mess with the other bits. I was reminded of my uni days. Surrounded by people who had never cooked for themselves before, I was a bit bemused. What do you mean you don’t know how to ‘make’ rice?! What is there to know. Alike anything, baking is a skill and to learn a skill you first have to master the basics. All this meant that when I approached vegan baking I was prepared for there to be new rules. And this really excited me. I watched copious Youtube videos breaking down the science behind vegan baking and for the first time I didn’t feel out of my depth starting a new avenue of baking. Sure, the learning curve was a little steep, but the logic came easier. Anyone who has perused the vegan baking YouTube and TikTok scene knows how eclectic and full they both are. Flax-egg for instance, a way to prepare flaxseed so it takes similar properties to egg in a bake, allows the baker to effectively use non-vegan recipes substituting as necessary. And vegan baking is confusing at times. I remember an incredibly decadent and moist chocolate cake recipe in which the instructions are to make a wet, syrupy batter and then add 350ml of boiling water to it moments before it goes in the oven! Arguably one of the best chocolate cakes I’ve ever eaten (Make It Dairy Free on YouTube) but also 45 minutes of stress-inducing triple checking the recipe and willing myself not to open the oven door to check. 

All this is saying that baking, and specifically vegan baking has altered the way I think about cooking. I once would have said that to me cooking is an art, and I still hold that it is a beautiful practise worthy of the title. But I get it. There is beauty in the science of cooking too. I always strayed away from the sciences in school, finding numbers and equations didn’t come easy to me, but recently the science and the logic behind cooking has been all I’ve thought about. I think Bourdain’s assertion that cooking is a craft is cleverer and more true than I gave it credit. The science of baking is something really beautiful and I can’t wait to learn more! 

Thanks for sticking around to the end, appreciate you!