Cooking without dairy isn't about imitating. It's about understanding what the dairy was doing in each dish —adding fat, adding acidity, adding body— and solving that with something else. Sometimes it's immediate. Sometimes you have to change the order of the steps.
Cold, it almost always works
Cold sauces, dressings, dips, spreads, breakfasts: here a plant-based ferment fits in without argument. It adds body and a tangy note that lifts the rest of the ingredients.
A tip: salt and acid before fat. If you dress first with salt and lemon and add the creamy part at the end, the flavour comes out much more defined.
Hot, always off the heat
This is the classic mistake. Any tangy, creamy preparation —dairy or plant-based— splits if it boils: the fat separates from the rest and lumps appear.
The solution is the usual one. Turn off the heat, wait a minute and then stir it in. And if the sauce has to stay hot for a while, temper it first: mix two tablespoons of the hot sauce with the creamy part, and return that mixture to the pot.
In baking, watch the acidity
An acidic ingredient reacts with bicarbonate of soda and produces gas: that's part of what makes a cake rise. If you swap an acidic dairy product for a plant-based ferment, which is also acidic, the reaction holds and you don't need to change anything else.
If instead you swap it for a neutral plant-based drink, you do have to compensate —usually with a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon— or the cake will come out denser than you expected.
What won't work
Melting. A plant-based ferment won't stretch or grill-brown, because that depends on the casein in milk and there's none here. If the dish needs something to melt, this isn't the substitution: look for another.
Don't expect a coconut base to disappear into the dish either. It tastes of coconut. In some things that adds a lot —curry, sweet potato, lime, paprika, chickpeas— and in others it doesn't fit. Better to keep it in mind beforehand than after.
The short rule
Cold, free rein. Hot, at the end. Sweet, watch the acidity. And if the dish asks for something to melt, change strategy.
Three of the substitutions this article talks about are solved in recipes: the salad dressing, the creamy dip and the pasta sauce. For cooking, the 500 g size is the one that goes furthest.
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Looking for a dairy-free option for breakfast or desserts? We explain what fermented coconut is and how it's made.