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9 best vegan cookbooks: Plant-based recipes for Veganuary and beyond

Whether full vegan, vegetarian, or giving Veganuary a go, you won’t be disappointed with these finds  (iStock/The Independent)
Whether full vegan, vegetarian, or giving Veganuary a go, you won’t be disappointed with these finds (iStock/The Independent)

Going vegan is a journey, and cookbooks are a big part of it. Many who consider themselves competent home chefs will find themselves suddenly unmoored by not just a lack of meat, but a pantry that’s full of things they’re no longer sure if they can trust, and a book collection that constantly demands the use of fish sauce and clarified ghee. The comfort of a tome that can be followed to the letter is a salve during these unsettling times, and particularly about two weeks into Veganuary, when finally you’ve been through every meat alternative that your local supermarket stocks.

However, we here at IndyBest know a secret about vegan cookbooks: most of them aren’t very good. They’re either written by people who have been plant-based all their lives and could happily eat tofu for every meal, or they’ve been compiled by those who came to veganism as a healthy-eating choice (a fine position) and are therefore exclusively interested in salads (not so much).

So we have spent the past six years of our lives trying to build a collection of vegan recipe books worth their maldon salt. As a keen home cook and recipe-follower extraordinaire (we may have been known to google what a “slug” of olive oil is in milliletres), we believe we’ve found the clearest and most foolproof bunch of vegan cookbooks out there, which we come back to time and time again.

Here are some of the favourites that have got us through years of weeknight meals, dinner parties and special occasions aplenty, with vegans and meat eaters alike leaving our home satisfied (well, they at least pretended to be).

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How we tested

For many of the cookbooks below, we have been testing them for numerous years. For the newer releases, we gave at least three recipes a go and judged them on simplicity, clarity and, of course, tastiness.

We also judged them on how vegan they were – our favourite books tend to be vegan-friendly rather than vegan-exclusive examples, but we understand that the stress of having to substitute foods, or parse an ingredients list before you get going, is not for everyone. However, we tend to think vegetarian and meat-eating chefs often do plant-based food the best, and as you become a more accomplished vegan cook, you often learn what things you can substitute most successfully, so we’ve included both sorts in our round-up.

The best vegan cookbooks for 2022 are:

  • Best overall I Can Cook Vegan’ by Isa Chandra Moskowitz: £15.99, Blackwells.co.uk

  • Best for weeknights – ‘East’ by Meera Sodha: £14.39, Amazon.co.uk

  • Best for vegetables – ‘Much More Veg’ by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, published by Bloomsbury: £17.34, Amazon.co.uk

  • Best for unexpected combinations – ‘One: Pot, Pan, Planet’ by Anna Jones: £26, Souschef.co.uk

  • Best for show-offs – ‘Flavour’ by Yotam Ottolenghi: £17.61, Amazon.co.uk

  • Best for unconfident cooks – ‘The Green Roasting Tin: Vegan and Vegetarian One Dish Dinners’by Rukmini Iyer: £17.99, Waterstones.com

  • Best for budget meals – ‘Broke Vegan: Over 100 plant-based recipes that don’t cost the earth’ by Saskia Sidey: £9.69, Amazon.co.uk

  • Best for family meals – ‘Bosh!’by Henry Firth and Ian Theasby: £9, Amazon.co.uk

  • Best for the health-conscious – ‘Asian Green: Everyday plant-based recipes inspired by the East’ by Ching He Huang: £12.51, Amazon.co.uk

‘I Can Cook Vegan’ by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, published by Abrams

Best: Overall

Rating: 10/10

  • How vegan? Completely

  • Easy ingredients? Mostly, some specialist shopping required

We never expected a book that wasn’t in our original collection when we started this round-up to take the top spot, but here we are. Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s I Can Cook Vegan is brilliant. When we flicked through we were hit, again and again, by the fact that it contains all our go-to ways to create vegan versions of home-cooked, comfort-food favourites that have taken us years to discover. The best white sauce for pasta that we finally nailed in 2019? It’s here, in the chickpea alfredo. The fact that a pad thai is perfect with brussel sprouts? That’s here too. How to make a banging banh mi? Isa says you’re welcome.

It’s a complete “best of” when it comes to meals people actually eat, and has a great balance between dishes that have veggies or meat alternatives at their core. It can be a little American – biscuits and gravy, anyone? – but all the amounts are listed in imperial and metric. There’s also sandwiches, soups, desserts, breakfasts and more. Moskowitz even got us excited about a Mexican-style chilli recipe for the first time in years by adding pearl barley for texture. Inspired. We just wish we’d had this book when we were starting out on the plant-based train.

Buy now £15.99, Blackwells.co.uk

‘East’ by Meera Sodha, published by Fig Tree

Best: For weeknights, but not as you know them

Rating: 9/10

  • How vegan? Entirely vegetarian with plenty of well-labelled vegan or vegan-adaptable recipes

  • Easy ingredients? Mostly, some specialist shopping required

Sodha’s East has been our most-used cookbook since it came out in 2019 – consulting its pages to write this piece made us realise that it’s more splattered than volumes we’ve had three times as long. Vegans often look to Asia for inspiration, as plenty of dishes from the continent are plant-based anyway. But this isn’t merely a collection of traditional favourites – East is a truly modern take on everyday cooking. There are no duds here, but the standout recipes include the forbidden rice salad (the miso cashew dressing is incredible), shiitake pho with crispy leeks, udon noodles with red cabbage and cauliflower (so, so easy) and the black dal. There is a section on eggs that will go ignored, of course, but the standard here is so high that it’s more than forgivable. Most of the recipes are completely conquerable on a weeknight, but there’s also a few more special ones (like the smoked tofu dish that results in bright pink, beetroot-dyed noodles) that will really wow guests.

Buy now £14.39, Amazon.co.uk

‘Much More Veg’ by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, published by Bloomsbury

Best: For vegetables

Rating: 8.5/10

  • How vegan? Completely

  • Easy ingredients? Yes

When our mum bought us this book, we had our eyebrow firmly raised above its usual position. Is Hugh not the lad that owns all those farm animals he slaughters? Also, surely he’s not very, well, cool? Well, we were an idiot. This is a great book by someone who loves vegetables, and owning it has brought us back to a style of food that we’d mostly abandoned since becoming vegan – ie, British. We don’t mean it’s all fish and chips; there’s just a lot of wintery food in this, and it focuses on seasonal produce. We keep returning to a creamy, nutty gratin of greens and leeks, a tomato dahl that can be made just from cupboard ingredients, and a celery soup recipe that’s topped off with a slice of fried pear. Everything feels unhurried and casual – a squash and cauliflower soup with sage demands that even the cauliflower stems and leaves are roasted too, before being bunged into a pan and jooshed up with a blender. Perfect for people who love soups and roasted veg more than anything (although there are excellent salads in here too).

Buy now £17.34, Amazon.co.uk

‘One: Pot, Pan, Planet’ by Anna Jones, published by Fourth Estate

Best: For unexpected combinations

Rating: 8.5/10

  • How vegan? Mostly

  • Easy ingredients? A big supermarket will suffice

Anna Jones has long been a go-to author for vegetarians and vegans in the UK, and the collective cheer that went up across the nation when it was announced her newest book was to be based around one-pot meals was positively deafening… well, in our house at least. We trust Anna implicitly, and One: Pot, Pan, Planet features thoughtful updates on classics we’ve come to expect from this modern cook: a tamarind and sweet potato dahl is a glorious showpiece-dinner wrapped in a weeknight meal’s clothing, while her Persian soup is a complete revelation – how she squeezes so much flavour out of so few ingredients, we’ll never know. These are recipes that just work too, so you can feasibly attempt one when time is tight and you’re barely concentrating and yet, magically, something delightful will emerge. Unexpected combos abound, but without the time investment you might expect: a carrot soup with tahini and rosemary, or a miso and caramelised banana rice pudding, are fabulous examples. This book also features advice from Anna on eating sustainably – a useful chapter for those undertaking Veganuary.

Buy now £26.00, Souschef.co.uk

‘Flavour’ by Yotam Ottolenghi, published by Ebury Press

Best: For show-offs

Rating: 8/10

  • How vegan? 45 out of 100 recipes are vegan, and another 17 are easily adaptable

  • Easy ingredients? Some specialist shopping required

Look, it’s an Ottolenghi. You know what you’re getting yourself into. Every recipe requires one new spice jar? Tick. Sides that take more work than a main? Tick. Ingredients lists that are the length of your fibula? Tick. But if none of that puts you off, you’ll be heavily rewarded. Highlights include oyster mushroom tacos with all the trimmings, rainbow chard with tomatoes and green olives, cardamom tofu with lime greens, and a mushroom ragu. The latter is absolutely spectacular, and although takes a long time, doesn’t actually require that much work. We had some pals around for a dinner party and knocked their little meat-eating socks off with it, serving it with some comically large pasta ribbons and a chicory salad.

Speaking of soirees, Yotam does at least have the good sense to include suggestions of how to put all these recipes together into cohesive, multi-course meals, and that helps considerably in making it a more navigable volume. Our only warning is that it’s not often hugely specific about how best to adjust for your veganity, so we wouldn’t say it’s for beginners. But if you’ve been around the (Violife) block a few times, and are confident in your substitution skills, you’ll be able to make some very tasty plates indeed.

Buy now £17.61, Amazon.co.uk

‘The Green Roasting Tin: Vegan and Vegetarian One Dish Dinners’ by Rukmini Iyer, published by Vintage Publishing

Best: For unconfident cooks

Rating: 7.5/10

  • How vegan? Half vegan, half vegetarian

  • Easy ingredients? Yes

Rukmini Iyer’s books, which are always based around one-tin dinners, are a phenomenon for a reason. This vegetarian and vegan title from the series came out in 2018, and we still haven’t found a better gift for the plant-based person in your life that never has time to cook. Although some of the dishes are a little lacking when it comes to complexity of flavour, it’s because, well, they aren’t complex to make, and they certainly still amount to more than the sum of their parts.

Highlights include roasted cauliflower with chickpeas, spring greens, lemon and tahini; crispy gnocchi with mushrooms, squash and sage (gnocchi in the oven, who knew?); miso aubergines with tofu, sesame and chilli; and crispy tamarind sprouts with peanuts and shallots. The all-in-one roasted tomato and bay orzo with black pepper gives you the comforting feeling of having ingested one of those instant pasta packs, but it’s actually nutritious. A fabulous book for beginner cooks and the terminally tired alike.

Buy now £17.99, Waterstones.com

‘Broke Vegan: Over 100 plant-based recipes that don't cost the earth’ by Saskia Sidey, published by Hamlyn

Best: For budget meals

Rating: 7.5/10

  • How vegan? Completely vegan

  • Easy ingredients? Yes

When you start off being vegan by stocking up on meat alternatives and bougie ingredients a la Ottolenghi, it can feel like the supermarket shop is quickly getting out of hand. But in reality, the bills calm down when you’ve found your rhythm. And Saskia Sidey’s book can help you find that rhythm much more quickly than you would have otherwise, via a range of delicious, simple meals. Examples span from five-minute feasts (pimped instant ramen) to weeknight curries (sesame aubergine) and examples of worthwhile, investment cooking – confit tomatoes made over a couple of hours go on to provide the building blocks for a caramelised shallot and tomato tart (made with pre-bought pastry, don’t panic!) that will be happily inhaled. This volume, which, by the way, is cutely dinky, also includes the most foolproof hummus recipe we’ve ever encountered.

Buy now £9.69, Amazon.co.uk

‘Bosh!’ by Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, published by HQ

Best: For family meals

Rating: 8/10

  • How vegan? Completely vegan

  • Easy ingredients? Yes

The country needed a vegan version of Jamie Oliver, and we’ve got it in the Bosh! boys – the YouTubers for whom it all got a wee bit out of hand. Now as easily spotted on the telly as they are flogging nooch in your local Sainsbury’s, it’s hard to begrudge these lads their success when their recipes are so consistently reliable. In last year’s round-up of vegan cookbooks, IndyBest gave a gong to the duo’s Speedy volume, which is fabulous, but for this year we’re returning to the 2018 book that started things off. We keep coming back to it for the basics, and the absolute state of the puttanesca page in our copy (a tomato-sauce-based crime scene) is testament to the versatility of this tome. The creamy mac and greens is a blinder, as is the rogan bosh! (we see what they did there) and the pesto lasagne – we’ve made this latter recipe many times now for friends and family, and it has never gone wrong. We’ve never been brave enough to try their savoury cakes (burrito, mezze), but the breakfast section is a welcome addition for amateur vegans that feel bereft of their weekly fry up. These are simple recipes explained clearly, and we think this collection would be particularly well-loved by families that rely on a rotating weekly menu.

Buy now £9.00, Amazon.co.uk

‘Asian Green: Everyday plant-based recipes inspired by the East’ by Ching He Huang, published by Kyle Books

Best: For the health-conscious

Rating: 7.5/10

  • How vegan? Completely vegan

  • Easy ingredients? Some specialist shopping required

We really took a shine to this new addition to the pantheon of vegan cookbooks. It’s very easy to follow, and has a little bit of a healthy-eating bent, but in a way that’s quite subtle and certainly not shaming. Each recipe is clearly labelled in terms of prep and cooking time, as well as calories. The East Asian recipes are the stars, with our favourites including a super simple chow mein, a gochujang spinach, gem lettuce and radish salad, and the yuxiang aubergine with shiitake mushrooms.

Despite the methods being incredibly simple – anyone that’s not a total beginner will be happy here – there’s plenty of respect for the reader’s adventurousness, along with an appreciation for meat replacements such as seitan. There’s also some fun surprises… the blueberry and lychee buckwheat pancakes, for instance. A lovely, playful and tasty book.

Buy now £12.51, Amazon.co.uk

The verdict: Vegan cookbooks

All the books here offer something unique, and which one you plump for will depend on your level of skill and, of course, what foods make you salivate. We think Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s I Can Cook Vegan will make an unbeatable addition to the bookshelf of vegans both long-minted and amateur. If you unabashedly refer to yourself as a foodie, Ottolenghi is, as always, your man. And if you’re looking to refresh your weeknight repertoire, Meera Sodha’s East is certain to invigorate.

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