Episode 13
Guide to Using Dairy Product Alternatives
Hello and welcome to episode 13 of the Beyond Nourished Podcast, where you will learn short tips and tricks to become a better, more efficient and health-focused cook.
I am your host Rachelle Girardin. I'm a certified nutritional practitioner, a private chef, and I'm the creator of the Holistic Chef Certification and Business Training.
In this episode, I'm going to be talking about how to make recipes creamy using two of my favourite dairy-free ingredients.
The first up is cashews. I absolutely love soaking and blending cashews and popping them into some of my favourite recipes to give a creamy consistency without having to use dairy.
The recipes I do this with gives them a little bit of a unique spin that you may have never heard of. For example, if I'm making any type of pasta sauce that is typically tomato-based (tomatoes are very acidic and sometimes people have a little bit of an aversion to that) a wonderful way to bring in a little bit of creaminess and also a touch of sweetness is to soak and blend cashews with a high-speed blender with a little bit of water until they are a really rich and smooth consistency. Then you add the cashew sauce back into your pot and you stir it in and it creates almost like a rose type of sauce.
If you're wondering why sometimes in recipes, it will say to soak your cashews, this is for two different reasons. First of all, most recipes are doing that because they're assuming that you don't have a high-speed blender. If you have a high-speed blender, turning unsoaked cashews into a creamy substance is a lot easier than if you have something like a magic bullet or just a lower-quality blender. It's still possible, but it's highly advisable that you soak them ahead of time.
Another reason that recipes suggest that you do this is that it allows there to be more volume of your cashews. The cashews are soaking up the liquid, and therefore you just get to add less and it creates more volume in your dish. This is also great from a health standpoint. Soaking the cashews will also make them more digestible. Blending them, in addition to soaking them, allows us to absorb the nutrients better as well.
If you forget the step, you can speed up the soaking process by boiling some water and then just soaking your cashews in that water. You always want to rinse your cashews after they've soaked for whatever amount of time you have them to soak for, whether it be overnight or for just a quick 10 minutes. Strain off that liquid, because we have little things in there that don't allow us to absorb the nutrients as much. Then you’ll want to pop them into the blender with a bit of liquid and get it to a really smooth and velvety consistency, and then add that back into your dish.
I love doing this in pasta sauces or meat sauces that are tomato-based. I also love doing this in soups or stews.
This kind of plays into my second ingredient for making creamy dairy-free recipes, which is steamed cauliflower or using cauliflower to create creaminess within a dish. A great addition to just steamed cauliflower that has been blended is to bring in a little bit of fat - something like a cashew to really up-level the richness of it.
I use cauliflower in a lot of my soup recipes - chowders especially - and all that you have to do is take a head of cauliflower, cut it up, steam it in a pot over the stove with a little bit of liquid, and then you can blend it with either water or stock or a milk alternative. This really helps develop richness and that creamy rather than kind of a watery puree.
Add in a little bit of fat, oil, butter or cashews, blend until it’s totally smooth and then add it back to your base. Whether it be a soup base or the inside of a chicken pot pie. It's such a wonderful way if you're thinking, how can I bring some richness or some creaminess into this dish.
If it’s somewhere that you might add cream traditionally, first do yourself a favour and think, maybe this is a place that I could up-level my dish by adding blended cashews or adding another vegetable and bringing in cauliflower instead.
I hope you guys have enjoyed this little hack around decreasing the amount of dairy in your diet and using these two special ingredients.
Also, a little reminder that you only have a couple of weeks left until we launch our Holistic Chef Certification and Business Training. If that's at all of interest to you, I highly recommend that you take advantage of it now! Beyond Nourished is opening our storefront here in Vancouver, Canada in the next few weeks and we will have our hands full with that, so I don't for sure know when the next round of the course will run after this next launch.
You can check out the details here, and as always, thank you so much for listening! Please share this podcast with anyone that you might know that would benefit from learning some health-focused kitchen tips and tricks. Stay tuned until the next episode.