Whole-food Vegan Recipes

This section is dedicated to helping people figure out cheap, easy, and tasty recipes - and also some more complex recipes for people wanting to try them out.

A lot of recipes found online that claim to be cheap and easy often turn out to be the opposite. They are also usually quite unsatiating. This list of recipes therefore aims to provide good, healthy, and filling meal ideas.

These recipes are all going to be whole-foods based, as it is the healthier and optimal alternative--with some non-whole-foods options that are not too unhealthy, for the people that want tastier dishes while not sacrificing health too much, like adding a bit of olive oil.

You are not required to be whole-foods based to be vegan, but the more whole-foods ingredients you use, the healthier the food will be.

Whole-foods is commonly defined as:

"Food that has been processed or refined as little as possible and is free from additives or other artificial substances[1]." - Lexico.com

Common ingredients and cooking methods that are not considered whole-foods will be replaced by the following:

• No oil, or as little as possible - there is no direct replacement, except for recipes where tahini or peanut butter works/are needed. However, a drizzle of olive oil is not a significant sacrifice in health, and only worth giving up if you want to optimize.

• No sugar, or as little as possible - replaced by date sugar, which is simply whole, ground dates and not actual sugar. It is, however, a more costly alternative. If date sugar is not available, simply blending whole dates into a date paste will do (accounting for a little extra amount of water in baking recipes). Sugar can also be replaced by sugar-rich fruits where applicable, such as bananas or mangoes, or sweet-tasting vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, and sweet onions.

• A not excessive amount of salt - accompanied by miso paste or soy sauce (or other fermented foods where applicable). If you lack both of these products, simply not using an excessive amount of salt should be fine.

• No alcohol - this is both unnecessary and unhealthy, as scientific consensus classifies alcohol as a carcinogen [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6].

• No frying - replaced by steaming, baking, or roasting.

• No refined grains - replaced by whole grains (e.g. whole-wheat pasta, whole-grain couscous, brown rice, etc.).

• Preferably no juice - replaced by the whole, blended fruit. If you do not have a blender, juice - like lemon juice instead of blended lemon - will do.

The recipes are sorted by difficulty level (from easier to more complicated), and by time (from fastest to longest to prepare). Difficulty, on the other hand, takes into consideration how complicated the preparation and cooking process is, how accurate the quantities of ingredients have to be for the recipe to turn out right, how important timing is, the amount of steps to take, and the chance that the recipe can turn out bad considering the level of knowledge of someone who barely or never cooks.

You can find all the recipes here: Index of Recipes

Most of the recipes are easily customizable, and you can easily add other ingredients on top to nuance the taste the way you want it to be.

Sweets

The sweets and desserts are mostly-whole-food vegan recipes.

Outside of raw food options (which are plentiful) there is quite a lack of whole-food vegan sweet recipes to be found online, with most of them using oil and pretty much all of them using refined sugar. While there's nothing innately wrong with oil and sugar in small amounts, in larger amounts they can result in nutritionally poor foods. In the context of a diet otherwise overly rich in nutrients (as is the case with many animal products) this doesn't introduce much nutritional risk (risk is more along the lines of obesity from over-nutrition), but in a plant based diet where protein and many vitamins and minerals may only exceed recommended amounts by smaller margins, replacing a significant number of calories with nutritionally poor sweets when it's not necessary can increase nutritional risk and increase the risk of failure on a vegan diet (a multivitamin can help mitigate this, but does not contain macronutrients). So while an occasional treat is fine, any vegan with a sweet tooth should consider rotating in some more nutritious sweets to satisfy those cravings.