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Vegan Butter

A general purpose plant-based butter, particularly suited for pastry and baking. Originally inspired by VeganBaking.net’s recipe back in 2018, this butter recipe has been constantly changing over the years and tested in various settings from sautéing mushrooms to making buttery flakey croissants. The recipe has since massively evolved based on inspiration from commercially available vegan butters (e.g. ForA Butter) and advice from r/foodscience.

This is really intended as a guide rather than a recipe as some ingredients may not be available, or you may want to tweak it based on your requirements for spreadability / plasticity. The product aims to be 72.5% fat, ~26.5% water and 4% others (salt, emulsifiers and flavouring). The end product can be quite hard, and is best suited to higher ambient temperature (e.g. Australia :>). This can be easily adjusted by substituting the ‘hard’ or ‘solid’ fat portion with more of the middle fat, or introducing more liquid oil.

  • approx. 500g of butter
  • 5 minutes
  • 30-45 minutes

Ingredients

Fats

  • 200g solid fat / shortening (e.g. Copha or deoderised cocoa butter), at room temperature
  • 100g refined coconut oil (can sub coconut oil if you don’t care about coconut oil flavours), at room temperature
  • 25g liquid oil (e.g. canola or sunflower, avoid olive oil)
  • 150g good quality coconut cream (min. 24-25% fat)
  • Optional: To make it the end product more spreadable, replace an equal amount of solid fat with more liquid oil (e.g. canola, sunflower)

Liquids

  • 10g aquafaba
  • 10g water
  • Note: You can also use all aquafaba or all water, it doesn’t matter that much probably. :)

Salt, Stabilisiers & Colouring

  • 5g liquid lecithin (e.g. soy), or suitable emulsifier
  • 2.5g salt (for enhancing flavour only; does not make ‘salted butter’. Increase salt if that’s your goal)
  • 2.5g sugar
  • 10g nutritional yeast
  • Optional: 10g plant-based yoghurt for some tangy-ness
  • optional: 0.5g (small dash) yellow food colouring

Directions

  1. Combine the coconut cream, and your liquids together.
  2. Mix in the salt, sugar, nutritional yeast and any other additions. Set aside.
  3. In a small pot, combine the remaining fats and melt them over medium heat, stirring occassionally, until the fat mixture reaches approx. 80C.
  4. Let it cool down to around 60C. You can speed this up by continously stirring it over an ice bath, until it reaches the required temperature.
  5. Add your lecithin / emulsifier and food colouring (if using). Blend using a immersion/stick blender (or, a blender, but I prefer using a stick blender for this) for a few minutes until the mixture is homogeneous.
  6. Add the coconut cream + liquid mixture from earlier. Continue to blend until the mixture is properly emulsified.
  7. Allow the mixture to cool over an ice bath (if you can be bothered), stirring / blending continously until it reaches a slurry-like consistency
  8. You can place the mixture straight away into a tupperware container, or molds. Refrigerate over night.

Note: The continous agitation of the mixture is meant to improve the final texture, as it is closest thing equivalent to Scraped Surface Heat Exchanger (SSHE) used in butter/margarine production. This allows the mixture to develop smaller fat crystals which can improve the final texture of the product. Even doing all this perfectly, it may never reach the desired malleability/plasticity as there are limits to what can be done in a home environment.