LAB NOTES: Vegan Buttah ( Version II )
Welcome back to the Domestic Culinary Lab! I’m Wayne aka The Mad Food Scientist.
Today I’m going to talk about making vegan butter. For the past few months, I’ve been tinkering with various recipes for vegan butter out of curiosity and, let’s address the elephant in the room. The sticker shock for a pound of dairy butter at the store. I’ve tried a few recipes. I cannot quite remember where I found the recipe below, but apparently, it was the second one I tried as my notes listed it as Vegan Butter Version II. As I have noted before, I rarely resist the urge to tweak, or modify a recipe. My philosophy with regards to recipes is that they are a nice launching point, or signpost to point the way, but I’m free to modify it to suit my tastes. Or in the case of you, my readers, you’re free to modify any recipe that you read here. It’s YOUR kitchen and YOU make the RULES!
ORIGNAL:
Ingredients
* 1 cup Refined Coconut Oil (240ml) Melted*
* 2 Tbsp Canola Oil See Notes*
* ⅓ cup Unsweetened Soy Milk or Almond Milk (80ml)
* 1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
* 1 tsp Nutritional Yeast
* 1 Small Pinch Turmeric
* ½ tsp Salt
Instructions
* Add melted refined coconut oil to the blender jug along with the canola oil.
* Add the apple cider vinegar to the unsweetened soy or almond milk and stir in so that it curdles into buttermilk. Add the buttermilk to the blender.
* Add the nutritional yeast, small pinch of turmeric and salt.
* Blend very well until smooth.
* Pour out into a butter dish and refrigerate until set.
* Remove from the fridge to thaw for a few minutes if using on fresh bread or creaming with sugar for baking.
Notes
1. The coconut oil must be refined coconut oil and not extra virgin coconut oil.
2. Avocado oil is a great option to use instead of canola oil. Olive oil also works but bear in mind that high speed blending can cause olive oil to become bitter. If using olive oil, add it in at the end and mix in without blending.
3. Storing: This lasts up to 2 weeks in the fridge. If you need it to last longer, freeze the excess and only keep what you will use within 2-weeks in your fridge.
4. Make it soft and spreadable: This butter recipe above comes out a lot like a traditional butter in that it’s very firm straight out the fridge and needs to soften first before it becomes spreadable (unless you’re spreading on toast, in which case you’re good to go!). This makes it great for the purposes that a regular butter is good for. However, if you want to use it mostly as a spread (that also works for baking and frying) and want it soft and spreadable straight out of the fridge then adapt the first two ingredients of the recipe as follows: ½ cup (120ml) Refined Coconut Oil and ½ cup (120ml) Canola Oil or Avocado Oil (OR ¼ cup (60ml) of each canola oil and avocado oil) and then follow the rest of the recipe exactly as it is. This results in a soft, spreadable vegan butter that still works great for baking and frying. Thanks to one of our readers for experimenting with the recipe and coming up with this adaptation.
5. This recipe makes one 9.7 ounce block (275g) of vegan butter.
LAB NOTES: 03 May, 2023
INGREDIENTS:
240g/1 cup Refined Coconut Oil Melted*
2 Tbsp Avacado oil or sunflower seed oil.
80g/⅓ cup Unsweetened plant based milk. Since I don’t use soy, or almond milk I’ll just use whatver plant based milk that I’ve made that week. It could be oat milk, barley milk, peanut milk, or split pea milk. Just whatever milk I decide to make.
1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar.
1 tsp Nutritional Yeast. An ingredient to test upping the amount of. Just not this time.
1 tsp Ground ginger ( I added this of my own volition )
1 Small Pinch Turmeric
½ tsp Salt. I didn’t omit this ingredient, however, if I was wanting unsalted butter ( which is what I used to buy in the store ), I would omit the salt.
METHOD:
First of all, I only have virgin coconut oil in the house, so that’s what I’ll use. I’ve never noticed a coconut-ey taste to the butter. Even if it did, I wouldn’t mind since I quite like the taste of coconut. To start off, I began softening the jar of coconut oil. I did this by firing up my electric kettle to heat water for making my tea. Once the kettle clicked off, I set the jar of coconut oil on top of it and draped a towel over it. I do realize that I could have microwaved the jar, but I didn’t want to melt down all of coconut oil. Besides, while it was softening I was able to weigh out the Oatmilk ( That’s what I made last wekend ), and added the vinegar into a glass.
Then I measured out the dry ingredients into a bowl.
When the coconut oil was softened enough. I weighed out the coconut oil into a one quart Mason jar.
Mason jars are quite handy things. I chose to use one to make the vegan butter in because I was going to use my immersion blender instead of a normal blender. I chose the one quart version to avoid making a mess, although, next time, I might try to use a one pint jar to reduce the amount of washup that I need to do. Then I microwaved the jar in the microwave in ten second increments until the oil was melted.
I could also have done so by putting water in a saucepan and putting the jar in the saucepan to act as a double boiler. Once the coconut oil was melted, I added in the dry ingredients and the oat-buttermilk.
I grabbed my immersion blender and began to blitz the contents of the jar.
Within a minute, or two the vegan butter was done. I poured the butter into a one pint Mason jar, lidded it, and put it in the refrigerator.
CONCLUSIONS:
This vegan butter recipe is easy to make and has a good flavour.
As I mentioned above, I may tinker with the amount of nutrional yeast. I also may leave out the ground ginger. I may also attempt, very carefully, to use a one pint mason jar next time.
The butter does get very firm in the refrigerator. However, it does soften up after a few minutes on the counter. I may borrow from another recipe and try re-whipping it after letting it sit in the refrigerator for five or ten minutes to see if it becomes even easier to spread.
I used some of this batch of vegan butter to pan fry some vegan “eggs” and it worked a treat.
I want to encourage you to try this recipe. As for me, I’ll keep tinkering with this, and other vegan butter recipes. If you like what you read, let me know. Even better, if you have suggestions of things you’d like to see me try please shoot me a line using the contact function. You never know, I may take a stab at it.
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