By Emily Buehler, Weaver Street Market Website Coordinator
Years ago, I had several vegan friends and continually tried to modify my recipes to accommodate them. Cookies were easy: margarine instead of butter, egg replacer, and voila! Vegan cookies. My vegan pancakes, made with water instead of milk, were passable: they didn’t fluff up quite as nicely, but people seemed to have low standards when it came to pancakes. It was cakes and muffins that eluded me: they wouldn’t rise. I’d pretty much given up.
Then along came coconut milk. I noticed it on sale one month, way down on the bottom shelf in the grocery section in Carrboro. I’d never had it, but it seemed rich and decadent so I bought a can. At home, I opened it: it wasn’t milky at all! It was solid fluff, like whipped cream. I tried a teaspoonful. “This stuff is good,” I thought, taking another spoonful. “And it’s from coconuts, so it’s probably really good for you.” Swiveling the can around, searching for the nutritional information, I ate my third spoonful.
- Protein, 1 gram.
- Iron, 10%.
- Saturated fat, 48%.
I choked on my fourth spoonful of fluff—48% per serving?!? How many servings had I just eaten? 96%? 144%? I held my breath, waiting for terrible repercussions; my heart kept beating.
Shaken, I spooned the rest into a Tupperware. As it turned out, only the top half was fluff; the bottom half was a cloudy liquid that had separated out. “Great!” I thought. “The fluff probably had all the saturated fat!” The Tupperware went into the fridge, where I tried to avoid looking at it.
There it sat until Tamara gave me some wild blueberries she’d picked in the mountains. They seemed more suited to muffin-making than cereal-topping, so I pulled out the flour and baking powder and got to work. As usual, I forgot that I’d need milk until I reached that line in the recipe. I never have milk on hand, and I didn’t much feel like leaving the house to find some. Peering into the fridge, hoping for some forgotten rice milk that hadn’t yet gone bad, I spied the Tupperware of coconut milk.
A light flickered on in my head: with all that fat, surely it would help the muffins rise! I’d read about saturated fats in bread dough, “protecting” gas bubbles and allowing them to expand more before rupturing, hence, more rising. Would this work in muffin batter as well?
I rescued the Tupperware from its exile and measured out a cup of coconut milk, mixing it into my muffin dries. It smelled heavenly. In went the blueberries, forming purple swirls in the bowl. Dropping spoonfuls into the muffin tin, I emptied the bowl and put them into the oven. Twenty minutes later, I crossed my fingers and opened the oven door: there they were, fully risen mushroom-top muffins, waving the vegan flag of triumph.
Since then, I’ve heard varying opinions on coconut milk’s nutritional value. While the prevailing notion has been that all saturated fats are bad, recent discoveries about trans fats have called into question the original guilty verdict of all saturated fats. (For a pro-coconut viewpoint, with several articles and links to dozens of research papers, visit the Coconut Research Center’s website at www.coconutresearchcenter.org.)
Whatever the verdict on coconut milk’s nutritional value, it works great in baking. I’ve since used it in pancakes and strawberry shortcake; a lactose intolerant friend used it in her cobbler topping and biscuits. Look for the cans in our stores.
Here’s the recipe for Vegan Blueberry Muffins.