Food Substitutions for Pandemic Times

What to do during the coronavirus pandemic if you don’t have all the ingredients in a recipe. Shopping and cooking these days is requiring a lot more creativity. Whether you’re staring at picked-over grocery store shelves, making the best of what your food delivery brought you, or trying to cook with just what’s in your pantry, odds are you may not have every ingredient a recipe calls for. Learning to adapt to and accept that will not only serve you well during the challenging times we’re faced with right now, but also any other time you step into the kitchen.

“You do have to be open right away to changing, and I think people are these days,” says cookbook author David Joachim, who literally wrote the book on food substitutions, The Food Substitutions Bible.

Joachim suggests a three-step process to think about making substitutions.

1. Assess the situation. What ingredient are you missing? What family does that live in? Do you have anything similar? If for example, it’s milk, do you have other dairy products? Plant-based milks?

2. Think about the function of the ingredient. Is it there for flavor or garnish? Is it a main ingredient, or a supporting player? Will not having it

3. Make a choice. Decide what will work best (best doesn’t always mean exactly the same or perfect) — and don’t necessarily look back. “Some people think that substitutes are magical and that one ingredient equals another,” Joachim says. “The results will be a little different.”