I am somewhat new to and bad at cooking food for myself, and I only want to cook vegan. Right now I pretty much only eat Tofu Fried Rice for every meal because that’s the only thing I’m good at making. I’ve been looking at vegan alternatives for lots of beloved foods, and there are a lot. Basically every single popular dish I have web-searched for has had a vegan recipe for it. Thought maybe it would be faster to ask for the exceptions, because my search engine gave irrelevant results. Any info?
I am not sure about taste and texture, but chemically animal proteins and other ingredients are qualitatively different from plant parallels. For example, how agar agar doesn’t jiggle the same way gelatin does when it sets, or how casein enables dairy to be turned into a variety of cheeses while soy milk protein really only makes tofu afaik
Maybe one day chemists will close the gap though, like they are trying to do at companies like Impossible Foods.
Sometimes you can mimic them just fine with regular old chemistry. For example, chicken soup. But for other things you’re right. We can already make vegan whey from precision fermentation. Gelatin and casein will probably be available soon enough, although I personally think agar agar is fine.