Ingredient substitutions

How to use it

Type the name of the ingredient you don't have and find one or more alternatives with rough amounts to get the same result. The substitutions are meant mostly for desserts and baking, where the proportions matter most.

Note

Every substitution can slightly change the taste, color or texture of the dish. For allergies or intolerances always check the ingredients of the products you use.

Before substituting, ask what job it does

This is the rule that makes any substitution list useful: an ingredient in a recipe isn't there «because it belongs», it's there to do a precise job, and the right substitution depends on which. The egg is the perfect example, because it does three jobs: it binds (in meatballs and burgers), it lifts (in a sponge) and it adds moisture (in a everyday cake). The binding job is replaced by starch or soaked breadcrumbs; the lifting job hardly gets replaced at all; the moisture job is replaced perfectly well by half a mashed banana or by yoghurt.

The same reasoning applies to butter (fat, but also structure when cold), to sugar (sweetness, but also colour and softness) and to cream (richness, but also body). A substitution that only accounts for flavour half works.

The three that always work

Buttermilk: 250 ml of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, stirred and left to stand for ten minutes. It isn't an approximation, it's exactly the acidity American recipes need.

Baking powder: if you're out, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate plus a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar does the same job. Baking powder is precisely that, pre-mixed and stabilized.

Icing sugar: granulated sugar blitzed for a minute in a coffee grinder or a blender. If it needs to stay loose, a teaspoon of cornflour per hundred grams.

When a substitution isn't improvised

In risen doughs and in precision baking the proportions aren't indicative: replacing the flour, the raising agent or the fat changes the structure, not just the taste, and you only find out at the end. There it's better to look for a recipe already written for the ingredient you have, rather than adapting one written for another.

And there's one case where it isn't about success but about safety: with an allergy or an intolerance, a substitution isn't enough. The ingredients on the packaging have to be read, even on things that «shouldn't» contain anything, because traces come from the processing and not from the recipe.

Nearby tools

To convert between fresh yeast, dried yeast and sourdough there is Yeast conversion, and to weigh when the recipe talks in cups and spoons Kitchen measures. To rework the quantities Scale a recipe, and for how long leftovers keep Food storage times.