Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook

This is a great intro to vegan food.Really simple recipies, suggestions for substitutes, it is a true culinary encyclopaedia!

I was looking for a Vegan cookbook & wanted something guaranteed to be full of recipes that were packed with flavour - the Vegonomicon came up again & again. When it arrived I thought it looked lovely but frankly the sound of a lot of the recipes scared me, maybe because I'm new to Vegan food & maybe because I'm English & some of the names of recipes were a bit alien to me with it being an American cookbook. The result was that after flicking through it I didn't pick it up again for a couple of months. What a mistake that was!I had hit a bit of a stale patch whereby I felt that the food I was making just wasn't delivering enough flavour & variety of flavours, I began to think that perhaps this would once again be my downfall & I'd end up drifting back to foods with animal products in them, that was until I picked up Veganomicon again. I had been using other Vegan cookbooks but they just weren't doing it for me.Now I've just finished my fourth recipe - 2 sweet & 2 savoury & I LOVE it!!! The cakes are wonderful (very sensibly you are advised to use an oven thermometer which helps) the Pumpkin Crumb & Pecan Streusel cake is amazingly moist & full of flavour, & the very low fat Chocolate Bundt cake is amazing - light in texture, deep in flavour & a joy to eat. Eating these has convinced me absolutely that eggs & butter are totally unnecessary when baking cakes. The Butternut Squash & Pumpkin Seed Rice Paper Roll's were awesome & delivered tonnes of flavour especially accompanied by the suggested accompaniment of Cranberry Chilli Dipping Sauce.The recipes are easy to follow - though in the UK I'd advise using a Tala Measuring cup or similar which shows American measures. There are some ingredients which are as yet alien to me but I'm finding googling them solves the problem. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book. 5 star!

This book gets five stars for ingenuity, which is surely an important feature of vegan cooking. However, I've had a devil of a time sourcing (and affording) some of the ingredients listed, and have also found many of the recipes to be incredibly time consuming. I'm happy to spend an hour assembling my dinner, but was disheartened several times by how long things took. So, despite being very excited about all of the options the book promised to offer me, I've found the ingredient lists and cooking times discouraging and have been using it less than I did at first. All of that said, there are some fantastic meals here which are sure to convert even the most staunch 'non-veggies' in the family. Just make sure you give yourself plenty of time to cook up that delicious vegan feast.

This is an excellent cook book for someone who knows nothing about cooking, as it is a persistent hand-holder that never takes any knowledge for granted. The writing is good, informative sections near the beginning are completely invaluable to novices, also if you're in the mood you could try cooking the recipes. Extra useful information is given for each recipe, such as an indication of how much of the cooking time you will spend in the next room doing something interesting. Tips are also provided, sometimes concerning substitutions (especially useful for someone like me who would leave the pasta out of mac'n'cheese if it saved her s trip to the shops) sometimes concerning techniques that might be new. The recipes themselves are mouth-watering, if ingredient heavy and slow, I would not rate this as a budget cook book. My biggest concern with this cook book is it badly needs to be translated out of American, and it has no pictures. Almost every recipe has a word in the title that is not in common usage in England, or even world-wide, without images all I can go is cook it and try to figure out what I ended up with.

It is definitely a book that has just about every kind of recipe in it. So far I've made two recipes, and both were very tasty and yet...not boring or predictable without being totally foreign. Absolutely love the way they combine flavors in ways I'd never have thought about, tbh. I still have to test the rest of the book of course, and granted , some of the long cooking times are sometimes a bit intimidating. From what I can gather though, you learn to prep once you step into this lifestyle more readily. You'll prep things in the weekend so you can use them during the week, refrigerating the basics, as it were and freeze in some recipes in one-man portions to make things quick to put on the table when you dont feel like cooking or have no time. It's just a matter of getting acquainted with your basics and getting over the hump of cooking things you're maybe not that familiar with - which of course can take a bit of extra time.

As a meat eater who is interested in other types of food I found this book highly entertaining and interesting. There are lots of delicious recipes however many are quite time consuming to make and also a number of the ingredients are pretty difficult to get hold of in the UK.The authors narrative is excellent and witty, it is a joy just to read through. They seem hugely enthusiastic about veganism without ramming it down the throats of meat eaters. Plus they seem to have a real focus on 'taste' rather than simply 'health', which again is refreshing is such a cookbook.Overall a big vegan cookbook with lots of ideas - their biscuits are particularly gorgeous. Not too many photos but then pesonally I don't mind that.

I do love Isa, though the veganomicon is showing its age. If you want to buy one of her books I would recommend Vegan Brunch as it teaches you all the basics like making seitan and vegan pancakes that are different in plant-based diets. Then I would recommend her baking books, if that's your thing. Ultimately, this book was great a decade ago, the category has moved very fast. Try Gaz Oakley, especially if you're british - his videos are online too.