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Vegan Recipes

Elizabeth Schwartz <betsys@cs.umb.edu>
Mon, 28 Aug 1995 09:15:26 -0400 (EDT)
v006.n036.18
It's easy to make vegan bread. 
In any recipe, you can substitute your favorite vegetable oil for butter, 
or substitute applesauce for the oil. If you don't use *any* oil, the
bread is more crumb-y, so using 1/2 oil and 1/2 applesauce is a good mix.
We use 1 TBSP oil and 1 TBSP applesauce for 3 1/2 cups of flour in our
large machine.

You can also just leave out the egg, and substitute a TBSP of water or
other liquid for each egg. There are also vegetarian egg substitutes; I
don't know much about them but I think they are based on lecithin. Again,
leaving out the egg makes the bread less 'cake-y' and makes it rise less.
Whole wheat sandwhich bread doesn't need eggs, but cake-like breads
(cinnamon bread, challah, fruit breads) will suffer a bit.

Don't put too much extra weight (raisins, nuts, other stuff) into a bread
without egg. A pinch of baking soda can help heavy breads, at some
nutritional cost. Egg also helps "glue" the loaf together; breads with 
lots of mushy ingredients, like carrot bread, are most likely to suffer.
We've made excellent banana bread without egg. 

You *can't* leave out sugar completely. The yeast *eats* the sugar which
causes the bread to rise. You *can* substitute honey or sucanat (lightly
processed natural brown sugar) instead of white sugar. You can also usually
use about 1/2 the sugar that most recipes call . If you substitute honey
for sugar, decrease the water in the recipe by about 1/2 the amount of
honey (ie if you use two TBSP honey, instead of 1/4 cup white sugar, cut
the water by 1 TBSP)

Note: you'll have to experiment with quantities of water.