Another vegan whipped cream attempt

In our attempts to eat ecofrugally, whipped cream has always posed one of the biggest challenges. Even before we started moving toward a dairy-free diet, there was the difficulty of disposing of the cans. Once we shifted away from dairy, we ran into all kinds of problems finding a suitable plant-based alternative. Coconut milk and coconut cream invariably failed to whip; aquafaba worked better, but lacked the creamy mouthfeel of the real thing. Eventually we found a canned coconut whip at Trader Joe's that works well for everyday use, but it's still not good for recipes that use whipped cream in bulk, such as raspberry fool and our anniversary cake.

This weekend, we found ourselves pondering this problem yet again. After our successful experiment last week with making our own plant butter, we'd realized that it would be possible to make this Thanksgiving's rhubarb pie fully vegan, and we were discussing whether it might be feasible to do the same with the pumpkin pie. It turned out that our favorite vegan food blogger does, in fact, have a pumpkin pie recipe, but the vegan whipped cream she suggests serving with it is one of those coconut-based versions that have never worked for us. I decided just out of curiosity to search for other vegan alternatives, and to my surprise, I actually found one at Nora Cooks. Just like our new vegan butter, this recipe relied on a mixture of plant milk and melted coconut oil. And we thought, well, if it works as a substitute for butter, why not cream? At any rate, what did we have to lose by trying it?

The recipe called for "unsweetened, unflavored plant milk" and said that soy worked best. However, we had only sweetened soy milk, so we decided to use some unsweetened almond milk we had left over from my carb-counting period. The other thing in the recipe that gave us pause was the amount of sugar it called for: half a cup to two cups of liquid. This seemed like a lot, and when we consulted Pillsbury, we found that this was actually double the amount recommended for regular whipped cream. We knew there was a chance the cream might not whip properly if we halved the sugar, but we also knew we might find it too sweet to eat if we didn't, so we decided to take the risk.

This recipe has two stages. First, you blend together the melted coconut oil and plant milk and let it chill at least 4 hours. Then you add the sugar and vanilla and beat it until it thickens. The recipe warned that this process would take 5 to 10 minutes, and at first, it looked like this would be right on the money. After 4 minutes, it was just beginning to thicken up and take in air; after 11 minutes, it was showing the first signs of forming ridges. But as Brian continued to mix and mix, it never got to the soft-peak stage. Instead, around the 14-minute mark, it began to look a bit curdled. When we pulled the beaters out, we discovered that the coconut oil had begun to re-solidify and was form lumps in the liquid. It was clearly never going to turn into anything resembling whipped cream.

This was a disappointment, but we weren't prepared to give up just yet. We thought the problem might be that the almond milk we used was too watery and hadn't integrated well enough with the coconut oil. We suspected that a higher-protein, higher-fat plant milk would work better, and we happened to have just such a product in the fridge: Silk high-protein plant milk, which I use as a coffee creamer. (It's expensive as plant milks go, but cheaper than most plant-based products sold specifically as coffee creamer, and it tastes better, too.) We'd actually considered using this the first time we made the recipe, but we decided to go with the plain almond milk since it was cheaper, and we knew that if the recipe worked with that it would work with anything. But since it hadn't worked, we decided it was worth giving the Silk a try.

Right from the beginning, this batch showed more promise than the first. The coconut oil blended well into the Silk, and when we pulled the mixture out after the chilling stage, it hadn't begun to separate the way it had with the almond milk. And as Brian began to whip it, whip it good, it thickened much faster. After only seven minutes, it was looking much closer to whipped cream than the first batch. It never got quite stiff enough to cling to the bowl, the way they always get it to do on "The Great British Baking Show." And the texture still wasn't quite what you'd expect from whipped cream; when we tasted it, our tongues could detect tiny blobs of fat that hadn't fully blended in. It was a bit more like a cheap vanilla ice cream—the kind that gets a bit grainy in the freezer—than like whipped cream. But it went down reasonably well over an apple crisp (which, as I predicted, worked fine with our new plant butter).

Even if this vegan whipped cream recipe isn't quite perfect, it at least serves as a proof of concept. We now know it's possible to get something with a flavor and texture close to whipped cream from readily available, plant-based ingredients. Now it's just a matter of tweaking the process to get something we can work with in our favorite whipped-cream-based recipes.

Now that we know it's possible to get plant milk to whip, perhaps for our next attempt we'll try another method that I found at a site called Milk Pick (independently corroborated at Cake Decoration Products). These sites claim that you can get plain old almond milk to whip if you first heat it in a double boiler with sugar, corn starch, and xanthan gum (or some other thickener such as guar gum). If this works, it would be both quicker and cheaper than the coconut-oil method. And if it doesn't, perhaps some combination of the two—such as adding xanthan gum, which is also an emulsifier, to the coconut-Silk mixture—would be more successful.