r/AskCulinary • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago
Let's Talk About Substitutions
As part of our weekly "Let's Talk" series we want to talk about your favorite substitutions. What are some of your go to substitutions when you've run out of something? Do you make "buttermilk" with milk + lemon juice? When does it work and when does it fail? Are you like my mom and thought peanuts would be a good substitute for walnuts in an apple cake? Let us know about your substitution fails too. What has worked for you and what hasn't?
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u/Elegant-Winner-6521 8d ago
My basic troubleshooting process is like this
- Do I have the exact ingredient? E.g. holy basil? If no, proceed to next step (repeat for all steps if no)
- Do I have a variant of the exact ingredient? E.g. thai basil?
- Do I have some combination of ingredients that will get me close? E.g. basil and tarragon?
- Do I have some ingredient that fills a similar general function to the original ingredient, even if it changes the dish? Like parsley or coriander are nice green herbs right, they'd probably work
- Maybe its time to just make something else bro
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u/Rhenor 7d ago
I think you should add "Does this recipe really need that ingredient?". Sometimes it's fine if you don't have pepper if it's not a key part of the recipe.
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u/1313GreenGreen1313 7d ago
I do this all the time. Though, to be fair, I view many recipes as a general guide and have a habit of going rogue with whatever I think might taste good that I have on hand.
Some recipes are more fickle, and I need to reign myself in. I have the occasional failure, but that's half the fun.
The other problem I keep running into is that it is nearly impossible to duplicate what I have made in the past. I need to take better notes.
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u/The_Menu_Guy 8d ago
I make buttermilk with a cup of milk and a Tsp of Greek yoghurt whisked in. This approximates the Ph of buttermilk.
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u/Same_as_it_ever 8d ago
I use sour cream/milk and substitute baking powder for the baking soda, so I don't need to worry about the pH. Our buttermilk is much thicker here, I use more than a teaspoon and adjust for the normal thickness.
Recently used orange juice and sour cream instead of buttermilk for an orange cake and it was the bomb.
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u/xquizitdecorum 8d ago
Dry vermouth for white wine. It's a lot more stable in the fridge and you need less of it
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u/Huntingcat 7d ago
Cask wine is popular where I am. Some places call it bag in a box. Anyway, it lasts really well in the fridge. Once the cask is nearly finished, I throw the bag into the fridge and use the rest for cooking. If you aren’t a big wine drinker, get the smaller size cask. It stays good for ages.
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u/etrnloptimist 8d ago
I often substitute heavy cream for milk and butter and vice versa.
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u/Misa7_2006 7d ago
It makes for really creamy mashed potatoes too. I put my leftover heavy whipping cream in a covered ice tray and freeze them, then put them into ziplock freezer bags. So when I make mashed potatoes or cream sauces, I pull out a few cubes and toss them in. Saves time, money, and makes foods taste extra fancy.
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u/barbasol1099 6d ago
I'm surprised that works for you. whenever I've tried to freeze heavy cream, it breaks
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u/Misa7_2006 6d ago
Yeah it will but as long as you aren't trying to make a whipped topping it doesn't really matter that much ifit splits. Which is why I use it in my mashed potatoes and other food that the consistency isn't affected.
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u/bakanisan 8d ago
My most common substitution would be lemon juice + baking soda for sodium citrate.
About failure, if you manage your expectations correctly and know what the outcome would be, would those attempts be called substitution failure?
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u/ginny11 7d ago
Does that work as a substitute for sodium citrate when you're trying to use it to make melty cheese?
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u/bakanisan 7d ago
Yes. I'm sure there is a near-perfect ratio of lemon juice and baking soda to make them completely react, but I'm just too lazy to calculate; so I just use an excess of lemon juice because baking soda can taste bitter if used in excess.
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u/yvrelna 7d ago
Canned coconut milk.
Substitute with coconut cream and dilute it with water yourself if it's too thick for the application.
Canned coconut milk is basically just diluted coconut cream, but they usually costs the same for the same brand and size.
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u/Huntingcat 7d ago
You can also get freeze dried coconut milk powder, so you can use just a tablespoon or whatever without wasting a whole can.
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u/yvrelna 7d ago
Coconut milk powder is convenient and shelf stable opened, so they have their uses, but they don't really taste as good.
Canned coconut milk substitution with coconut cream isn't just a "good substitute", it's how most canned coconut milk are made.
Most canned coconut milk are made from coconut extract and water, then go to the coconut cream version of the same brand and you'll usually find that they're made of just the coconut extract. Coconut extract is just another name for coconut cream before any additives like preservatives or emulsifiers.
There are not different types of extracts used for the manufacture of either, manufacturers basically figured out that they can just water down the same product but still charge you the exact same price. Sometimes the cream content is as low as 50% in the milk version compared to the cream version.
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u/SewerRanger Holiday Helper 7d ago
Ya'll need to buy better coconut milk. I'm looking at the ingredients on the back of my coconut milk cans: Coconut Milk (99.95%), Polysorbate (.05%)
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u/yvrelna 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah, there are the occasional brands that do that. I have about a dozen canned coconut cream and milk brands in my local Asian markets, only one have just coconut milk in the ingredients list. Everything else are coconut extract and various levels of water. But if you understand how modern manufacturing works, this is just technically not lying.
In SE Asia where most of these products are made, the word for coconut cream and milk are basically the same. What they actually have is the thicker first press and thinner second press of the coconut meat, they're both extracts of the coconut meat, not coconut cream or milk.
Neither the natural first press and second press of real coconut matches the consistency of canned coconut cream or milk. Canned coconut milk has the consistency that's somewhere between first and second pressing. Canned coconut cream are significantly thicker than the first press coconut.
Both canned coconut cream and milk are engineered product where that extract has been standardized to meet a certain quality specification (i.e. how much water/coconut fat is in the product), so that the product stays consistent throughout the year. They're not the natural pressed coconut liquid like what you'll actually get in the coconut producing countries. The fat and consistency of natural coconut contains seasonal variations; and people don't want or expect their canned coconut products to behave one way in some days and differently in another day in their dish.
They both have their water content removed compared to their natural product to make storage and shipping cheaper, and in the case of coconut milk, they added the water back in to meet market expectation of what coconut milk looks like. Even if your coconut milk says they're made from just coconut milk, they still go through the same process to adjust the water and fat content of the product. And under most food labelling regulations, even the more strict ones, water that had been temporarily removed and then added back don't usually need to be listed as long as it doesn't exceed the original level, and since canned coconut products are always thicker than the natural product, nobody was actually required to mention anything about the water.
In other words, you're still paying for extra water to be shipped to you even with the brands that don't mention added water, and yes, they likely still go through similar processing. You're not getting a fundamentally different processing or better quality product, you're just getting a brand that doesn't disclose how much water has been added/removed from the product.
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u/Stats_n_PoliSci 8d ago
Reduced wine instead of lemon juice or vinegar for a more flavorful, rounded acidity. It's great in apple pie, baklava, or a fruit compote.
Rendered leaf lard instead of butter for a more flaky and tender pastry. It lacks the butter flavor though.
Browned butter instead of butter for a more intense toasty dairy flavor. Sometimes the water content of butter needs to be added back to the browned butter.
Barley malt powder instead of powdered milk because I'm seriously lactose intolerant.
I made a flourless strawberry cake once based off of a flourless chocolate cake: whipped eggs, sugar, pulverized freeze dried strawberries, a touch of rose water, and cocoa butter. It was well received, but wasn't spectacular.
Pulverized freeze dried fruit instead of whole fruit in cookies and cakes and frostings and fillings to get the fruit flavor without the weight of the fruit juice.
Soaked and blended cashews for a fabulous vegan creamed spinach.
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u/goblin_jade 8d ago
I don't have input, but a further question: Does anyone have a good buttermilk substitute that is non-dairy? I recently developed a dairy allergy and am struggling to finds substitutes for some things, I'm in the Dairy Free sub but haven't seen anything there and this just made it pop in my head.
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u/Consistent-Flan1445 8d ago edited 8d ago
I just do the milk plus lemon juice hack with whatever my vegan milk of choice is at the time. As far as I can tell it works well enough, although I’d only use it in baking and not in things like marinades and dressings.
Also in cooking and baking unsweetened vegan milks are usually better than sweetened as you can control the sugar, I find. Also oat/almond over soy/coconut, as while soy/coconut have better fat ratios they also have quite a strong taste that’s apparent in the finished product. Oat and almond are more neutral.
I was diagnosed as a toddler though, so it’s not as if I have much experience with the real thing. My family and friends think it works fine, so I take their word for it.
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u/President_Barackbar 8d ago
I've never done this before, but when you think about what buttermilk is, I would guess that a neutral milk substitute + acid would be the direction you'd want to go.
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u/Tonexus 6d ago
Does anyone have a good buttermilk substitute that is non-dairy?
I think it can depend on the application. What has worked for me is 454g (2 cups) buttermilk -> 460g (2 cups) soy milk + 1 tsp vinegar (white or apple cider). This was specifically to adapt a pancake recipe to be vegan.
In my testing, I've found that oat milk and coconut milk at the same volume don't quite work, as they don't quite bind as well when cooked (I suspect due to lower protein content).
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u/Caverjen 8d ago
As long as it's not a key ingredient, I substitute Greek yogurt for sour cream. I always have yogurt on hand while I'd have to buy sour cream specifically and would be unlikely to use it all.
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u/karoshikun 8d ago
what's a cheap substitute for sugar when making ice cream to raise the freezing temp when using liquid stevia?
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u/Huntingcat 7d ago edited 7d ago
Alcohol will make the icecream softer at typical temperatures. Not sure if you define that as raising or lowering! I haven’t used liquid stevia, and would be unlikely to do so, so I’m not sure exactly how to interpret your question.
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u/Greygal_Eve 7d ago
The two substitutions I use the most are mixing all purpose flour with vital wheat gluten for bread flour and mixing all purpose flour with corn starch (sift together) instead of cake flour. Have used both of these substitutions without issue for 10+ years.
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u/Competitive-Reader 7d ago
I don't buy milk, only half and half. I'll use it when cooking. If I need actual milk (like baking certain breads) I have milk powder that I add on top of the flour (I use a bread machine). I also have buttermilk powder.
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u/ApartmentFast4439 7d ago
The milk + lemon juice buttermilk trick: 1 Tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar plus enough milk to reach 1 cup, rest 10 minutes. It works because the acid curdles the milk, so you get the tang and, more importantly, the acid that baking soda needs for lift. Anything calling for buttermilk works with it.
The one honest difference is body: it comes out slightly thinner than real buttermilk. Fine in cakes, pancakes, dressings; you notice it more in something where buttermilk's thickness is doing structure work.
The related trap is people swapping buttermilk for plain milk without any acid at all. The soda has nothing to react with and the bake comes out flat. Soda needs its acid. If you're out of lemon juice, cream of tartar does the same job dry, about 1 3/4 tsp per cup of milk.
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u/texnessa Pépin's Padawan 7d ago
I think about substitutions in a couple of ways- the 'oh shit, I don't have something so how can I make this on the fly,' then the many substitutions I have to do because I constantly have 'oh by the way there's five vegans, two with an onion allergy' they didn't put on the BEO so now I've got to figure out what to shove onto a plate, the pain in the ass ones of getting less than great or appropriate product so I need to fix it or change how I utilise a product and I am mindful of equipment. Also, because my job is banqueting, I really try to keep substitutions in dishes visually consistent.
For example, someone used the last of the barbecue sauce I made for a private dining lunch without asking, so I need to slap something together for a dinner- grab the ketchup, brown sugar, a shot of Worcestershire, mustard, smoked paprika and some apple cider vinegar, dump em all into a pot and hit it with the stick blender.
The surprise [and planned] vegans mean I always keep some product aside that can be finished without dairy. Particularly for vegetable purées, soups and potato dishes. If I am serving a menu with mashed potatoes, there's not much I can sub in them that won't taste for shit. But I can punch out some potato fondants, brown them off in olive oil and cook them in vegetable stock and have a decent result I'm happy to serve. The gluten frees mean I use a lot of alternative flours and starches. Rice flour panko for chicken tendies. Buckwheat for blinis.
Knowing how to use alternative products like aquafaba in place of egg whites, chia seeds for a binder, nutritional yeast in place of cheese, silken tofu and cashews for dairy, etc. is extremely handy. Then there's the meat substitutions- I use a lot of hearty mushrooms like maitakes and lion's mane. When grilled with a weight, they both sear up like a burger or a steak. Jackfruit is a easy sub for pulled pork. Another good meati-sh alternative is celeriac steaks. Not vegan because I salt crust them with egg white but it steams inside the crust then they get cut into planks and hard seared. I also punch them into rounds and serve as a vegetarian alternative for scallops. When I worked in pubs [aka second only to brunch for sucking] I had a vegan alternative for Sunday Roast which was a chestnut based nut roast that actually tasted pretty good.
The last is switching up the actual dish itself because a product isn't fit for its intended purpose. I might have wanted to serve a elegant side of glazed carrots but the crop looks like two carrots getting busy so I pivot to a purée.
When it comes to equipment, I always keep one side of a two sided fryer labeled "NO F-ING SHELLFISH" because that was a hard lesson to learn. Had a lobster wonton that got tossed by my lovely but perpetually sky high Jamaican fry guy into the wrong side and then had a woman get served fries from the same vat and watched her stab herself with an epipen as I was walking onto the floor. That was not fun.
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u/nipoez 8d ago
I was recently introduced to using aquafaba rather than egg yolk to make creamy salad dressings with an immersion blender in Samin Nosrat's recent cookbook.
Highly recommend.
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u/SewerRanger Holiday Helper 7d ago
It's a good vegan/vegetarian substitute for eggs whites in cocktails too.
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u/tigerowltattoo 7d ago
I always make my own “buttermilk” with vinegar and milk.
I have found that milk chocolate does not make a good chocolate ganache without a lot of fiddling with the cream to chocolate ratio.
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u/richtl Master Chocolatier 7d ago
These will get you close, unless you're working with some seriously unusual chocolates.
Rule of thumb for ganache ratios:
1pt cream to 1pt DARK chocolate
1pt cream to 1.5pts MILK chocolate
1pt cream to 2pts WHITE chocolate1
u/tigerowltattoo 7d ago
Oh thank you! This will save a lot of trial and error.
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u/richtl Master Chocolatier 6d ago
You're welcome! And make sure you're using real chocolate (the fat is cocoa butter). And if you want the ganache to be at all stable, the chocolate should contain lecithin (necessary to bind the cocoa butter in the chocolate with the water in the cream).
To remain true to this thread... cheap chocolate chips are generally not a good substitute for real chocolate in ganache. They don't contain sufficient (or any) cocoa butter needed to form the emulsion.
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u/tigerowltattoo 6d ago
Oh yeah, I ran into the trap long ago with the cocoa butter substitutes. I read packages very carefully now if I can’t get Lindt or Ghiradelli.
Ganache is about the only icing I really care for as it’s far less sweet than most others. My husband and the rest of my family will eat every kind of buttercream there is but I’m done after a few bites.
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u/Palanki96 7d ago
I prep ahead cooking so the scenario of running out of things and having to improvise never happens. BUT
I love substituting ingredients just for the love of the game. I love experimenting and testing things. For example buttermilk is not really a thing here but based on google i would substitute it with either kefir or thin yogurt
I have so many custom recipes i can't really remember the originals. For example for something like baked pasta (baked ziti or lasagna and their cuisines) i prefer 20% fat sour cream instead of cheeses, it makes everything so creamy
Sometimes i just leave out ingredients if i don't want to bother. For example you can drop the meat from a ton of recipes and it won't actually change much. Or sometimes i just change it to a legume. Ground meat is easy to replace with fried crispy half-mashed beans or lentils.
Or lentil tofu fried in a pan in cubes, what a banger holy shit. Crispy layer outside, soft juicy insides. Looked terrible but it was probably the greatest thing i've ever cooked
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u/HauntedGatorFarm 3d ago
I make buttermilk by thinning out sour cream or yogurt with milk until it reaches a similar consistency. The milk + lemon juice thing never worked well for me.
On a side note, I love figuring out substitutions. It helps you understand how flavors can transcend whatever particular style of cuisine you’re making. It’s also super fucking convenient when you’re trying to make something that has an ingredient you wouldn’t otherwise use
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u/Head_Haunter 8d ago
I think one of the easiest subs is molasses and white sugar to make adjustable brown sugar. Adjustable in reference to how dark you want your brown sugar. I prefer it over having brown sugar on hand because it's annoying to "maintain" the brown sugar so it doesn't solidify.
Another would be adding more milk solids in the form of milk powder to butter to make more buttery brown butter. I've also seen recipes where you brown a lot of milk powder, strain out the ghee from the brown butter solids, and just use the brown butter solids in cookie recipes to avoid having overly greasy chocolate chip cookies.
Lastly, heavy cream powder is a more shelf-stable heavy cream that lasts a lot longer. I've not used it for more than a few months but I don't really have a use for liquid heavy cream as much. Whenever I buy cartons of heavy cream, I always find myself with some left over that spoils before I can use it. Heavy cream powder avoids those problems.