Vegan
Our 13 Most Popular Vegan Recipes of All Time
Featuring spicy wontons, risotto, and chocolate chip cookies.
Whether you’re eating vegan for a year, month, or just a meal, you should never be sacrificing flavor. Vegan recipes—especially the ones we’ve gathered below—are consistently delicious and often affordable (animal products can be expensive). These are our best vegan recipes of all time, ranked by popularity.
13. Vegan Slow-Cooker Tomatillo Stew
This tomatillo stew is the meatless, bean-having, green chili of your dreams. The spice of jalapeños and diced chiles is perfectly balanced by the freshness of cilantro, lime juice, and whichever cold beer you’ve got in your fridge.
12. Gena Hamshaw's (Vegan) Deli Bowls With Smashed Chickpea Salad
This smashed chickpea salad allows you to transform a pantry staple into a bright and substantial meal. Tossed in a vibrant lemon tahini dressing, this dish works on its own for lunch or as a shareable afternoon snack.
11. Asparagus With Lemon-Pepper Marinade From Bryant Terry
While this recipe was designed for asparagus, it serves as a template for nearly any vegetable you have on hand. The process is simple: blanch, toss in a lemon-pepper marinade, and grill. Some other vegetables we'd substitute are broccoli, cauliflower, or even green beans.
10. Perfect Vegan Pie Crust
This recipe confirms that a perfectly flaky pie crust is possible without butter—you just need coconut oil. We love this crust with a blueberry, apple, or strawberry filling.
9. Vegan Lemon Asparagus Risotto
According to the recipe developer, this dish proves that risotto’s richness actually comes from arborio rice and not dairy. Using deeply flavored vegetable stock and umami-rich nutritional yeast, this risotto is as complex and luxurious as any.
8. Vegan Croissants
A testament to the progress of dairy alternatives, these croissants swap traditional butter for a plant-based alternative while still maintaining the pastry’s iconic flaky finish. While the recipe developer specifically uses butter from ForA Foods, any plant-based alternative that is packaged for baking should work.
7. J. Kenji López-Alt's 15-Minute Creamy (Vegan) Tomato Soup
It should be to nobody’s surprise that this delicious, convenient, and impossibly quick tomato soup comes from the always inventive J. Kenji López-Alt. Make this during the next cold, rainy day.
6. Vegan Tofu Wontons in Chile Oil
According to the recipe developer, “these wontons just happen to be vegan.” Stuffed with meaty tofu and umami-dense dried mushrooms, there certainly is no shortage of flavor in these dumplings.
5. Easy, Creamy Vegan Salad Dressing
“This was fantastic,” “legitimately the best salad dressing I have ever tasted,” and “This is EXCELLENT” are just a few of the many glowing reviews this dressing has earned. The secret ingredient: nutritional yeast.
4. No-Fuss Vegan Cornbread
This no-fuss cornbread is moist, delicious, and comes together in just 45 minutes. Simply combine the wet and dry ingredients, pour into an 8-inch square cake pan pan, and bake. This pairs well with the aforementioned tomatillo stew.
3. Zucchini Verde Vegan Enchiladas
These gluten-free, vegan enchiladas are anything but boring. Pairing zucchini with tomatillo salsa, tofu, and tender black beans, this dish strikes the right balance of texture, spice, and freshness.
2. Simple Vegan Pesto
By increasing the amounts of olive oil and nuts, and adding nutritional yeast, pesto can maintain its rich, savory flavor without using cheese. Like any other pesto, toss this into pasta, spread it on sandwiches, or drizzle it over grilled vegetables.
1. Ovenly's Secretly Vegan Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies
One of our Genius recipes, these cookies are “soft-bellied, chewy, caramelly-crisp-edged, rippled and ringed and puddled with melty chocolate.” If you aren’t already convinced that they’re worth your time, any of the 300-plus positive reviews should quell your doubts.
The Food52 Vegan Cookbook is here! With this book from Gena Hamshaw, anyone can learn how to eat more plants (and along the way, how to cook with and love cashew cheese, tofu, and nutritional yeast).
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