Hey all,

I am currently working on shifting towards a vegan diet. I have recently purchased a number of cookbooks from the thrift shop, most of them older cookbooks not centred around any specific diet, some of them based on a vegetarian, and one single one about vegan baking.

My reason for getting older cookbooks and ones focused on vegetarianism rather than veganism despite me trying to go vegan is because I’ve also been challenging myself to purely purchase second-hand goods whenever possible. This, when paired with my tight budget, has unfortunately made most vegan cookbooks too expensive, as the thrift shop I most often frequent, sells their books at a dollar a piece.

The one vegan cookbook I have has some suggestions for ingredient substitutions. For sour cream, it suggests using either 1 part soy yogurt, 1 part soy cream, and a splash of lemon juice as one option, and finely pureed silken tofu as another option.

My three questions are the following:

1. Considering that this cookbook is focused specifically on vegan baking, will these sour cream substitutes work as such in general cooking, or purely where sour cream is used in baking?

2. For the soy yogurt-based substitute, would oat or almond-based equivalents also work, or are there certain qualities exclusive to soy alternatives that other plant alternatives don’t have that makes them most suitable as a sour cream substitute?

3.When shopping, are products labelled as “creamer” the same as products labelled as “cream”? I was only able to find the former at the supermarket.

Thanks for any and all help in advance, and I apologize if this isn’t the community best suited for a question such as this. I’ve been especially curious as I have an older blender-centric cookbook from 1961 that has some vegetarian soup recipes with the only thing keeping them from being vegan being the inclusion of sour cream as a thickening agent.