Today, I took a walk on the wild side, and made vegan cookies! You see, I'm not very good at baking. To quote my loving mother, last time I made cookies, she asked "How can you butcher something like this?" Well Mom, I don't know, but this time, my uber delicious vegan cookies came out great. I would take a picture of them, but anyways, they are a lovely beige colour ( i.e. NOT BURNT). I was also supposed to take them out while they were still a bit soft, because they harden just a little more when you let them cool off. I'm so proud of the outcome.First things first: the recipe. I found the vegan chocolate chip cookies recipe here. The recipe was written by a woman named Denise, and here's what she suggested:
Ingredients:
- 2 cups unbleached flour
- 2 tsps baking powder
- 1/2 tsp.salt
- cinnamon to taste (optional)
- vegan chocolate or carob chips - put in as many as you like
- 1 cup raw sugar
- 1/2 cup canola or vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 cup water
VERY IMPORTANT-make sure all ingredients are at room temperature. It will work if they're not at room temp but it works MUCH better if they are. Also while your oven is pre-heating put the cookie sheets you are going to use on top of the oven so they get preheated as well. Preheat oven to 350.In a large bowl mix flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon (if you choose). Add chips. Make a well in the center and set aside.
In a medium size bowl mix vegan sugar and oil. Mix it well. Add the vanilla and then add the water. Mix it well. Add the wet to the well in the dry. Mix it well but be careful not to overwork it. Add more chips if you need to. Spoon onto ungreased cookie sheets. Put them in the oven. Bake for 5 minutes and then flip and rotate the sheets.(top to bottom,and 180 degree rotation) Bake another 4 minutes and check them.
The results are great. My brother had the same assumption I did: we thought that as soon as we'd bite into one I'd taste vegetables (from the oil), but really it mixed into everything well and I wasn't able to discern it. However, the amount of vegetable oil this recipe calls for grossed me out. Especially when I was mixing all the liquids and the sugar together, I found it hard to wipe away the look on my face. It's the face you make when you find out about the bad ingredients that go into one of your favourite foods; you're mildly disgusted, but you shrug and eat it anyways.
Another plus is that vegan cookies take 3 times less time to be cooked than normal cookies! The recipe is also really easy to follow. I can definitely see people wanting to eat their cookies sooner with this recipe than later. The one thing is that I don't know much about vegan foods, and I don't know how unhealthy this compares to normal cookies. There's a lot of oil in there, but then non-vegan recipes might call for lots of butter, or cream, even milk, and eggs. So I'm not sure if I can consider this a healthier option in addition to being a faster one.
So let's compare vegan cookies with non-vegan cookies. Vegan cookies won't use any animal products, so the fat mostly comes just from vegetable oil. Non-vegan cookies typically call for eggs, milk, and butter. If everyone only used vegan recipes, animal products would decrease in demand, but then there would be a considerably higher stress on vegetable oil production. Would it then really change anything if now, instead of buying land for different livestock and cattle to live on, we are buying land to grow crops to turn into oil? Soil degradation would occur in both cases, wouldn't it?
In any case, I think veganism is an interesting choice. I'm not quite clear as to why vegans don't drink milk, or eat eggs, for example, because if the cow isn't milked it'll be in pain, and you can't stop a chicken from laying eggs, but I understand the staying away from animal food and clothing. It's more sustainable, as far as keeping animals for the sole purpose of food goes, and it might even be a healthier choice too. I enjoyed this cooking experiment and am happy that I didn't notice a huge difference from non-vegan cookies.
Want to know more?:
Denise's vegan chocolate chip cookies: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=6391.0
Images found on Google.
Ok so these were really good! Surprisingly so! (not like some of Laura's other recipes ie Jello Shots - ugh!) It tricks you into thinking that they are healthier than other cookies but they are still just as high in fat and sugar. But they are vegan! And yes, they go very well with non-vegan milk!
ReplyDeleteHmmm I'm not sure if they're JUST as bad as non-vegan cookies... A vegan girl in my class explained that vegan recipes don't have any animal products in them which means there is less cholesterol (sp?). But yeah, the vegetable oil took up a good part of the recipe.
ReplyDeletethanks for the recipe! to answer your wondering about cows being in pain until milked, and chickens laying eggs anyway.... In factory farming (which most are), cows are inseminated to make the cows lactate, so that they can be milked. They are milked constantly, and as you can imagine, it's very painful. Factory chickens are fed drugs and hormones to make them lay an unnaturally large number of eggs. It's a totally unnatural and unhealthy process. Read anything from John Robbins (son of Baskin Robbins empire) who turned away from his family fortune when he realized what harm was caused to human health and the environment from eating animal products (milk, eggs, cheese included). Or go to www.foodrevolution.com Hope that helps. :)
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