Q: I’m allergic to milk, and I see that a lot of recipes in the book call for butter or milk. Is there a good substitution?
Answer: In most of the dessert recipes you can substitute plain soy milk or non-dairy liquid coffee whitener (such as Rich’s). The results won’t be as good but will be fair. You can also use imitation sour cream or cream cheese (such as Tofutti) with fair results. The same applies to substituting margarine with butter. Finally, a word about heavy cream: you can use an unwhipped non-dairy whip topping (again, such as Rich’s) in the chocolate glazes and ganaches, but use an equal weight in ounces of chocolate and whip topping. In other applications just replace the same amount of heavy cream with the whip topping. You will be sacrificing flavor and texture to a certain extent, but in strongly flavored desserts such as chocolate this will be less apparent. You cannot replace the dairy in desserts where dairy is the shining star, such as ice cream. To make a non-dairy frozen dessert would require a completely different recipe.
