Traditional pastry cream contains milk, sugar, egg yolk, cornstarch, vanilla, and butter.

Vegan pastry cream is made with non-dairy milk🙋‍♀️, sugar, agar, flour, cornstarch, vanilla, and vegan butter🍴.

While agar agar powder🛒 is a fine replacement for egg yolk when it comes to thickening, there are two optional ingredients that can help with other aspects.

1. A tiny pinch of kala namak (black salt)🛒 adds a whiff of je-ne-sais-quoi egginess that offers an extra hint of gourmandise.

2. A pinch of turmeric creates a golden hue.

How to make vegan pastry cream

See the pastry cream recipe🍴 for ingredients and straightforward instructions. Come back here for more detail and photos.

The best pastry cream is made with a vanilla bean gently cooked in milk for 15 minutes, but vanilla essence is a perfectly fine substitute.

When the milk is hot (and vanilla bean removed, if using), add the dry ingredients and cook for several minutes until the cream is thick and smooth, with no hint of powder when you taste it.

Once the cream is fully cooked, remove it from the heat and gradually stir in pieces of cold butter🍴 until it’s fully incorporated and the cream is thick and glossy.

Let the cream cool for 10 minutes, then cover* and refrigerate for an hour.

Once chilled, the pastry cream will be firm enough to cut. So there’s one more step before you can use it.

With a sturdy silicone spatula🛒, work the cream thoroughly, pressing against the sides of the bowl and stirring until it’s smooth and creamy. Et voilà!

Use plain (vanilla) pastry cream in crêpes🍴, éclairs, fruit tarts, and mille feuilles. Or you can flavor it with chocolate, coffee, citrus, nut paste, liqueur, rum ….

In addition, vanilla pastry cream is the basis for several other essential creams:

• crème chiboust (pastry cream + Italian meringue)

• crème diplomate (pastry cream + whipped cream)

• crème frangipane (pastry cream + almond cream)

• crème légère (pastry cream + small amount of whipped cream)

• crème mousseline (pastry cream + additional butter)

• crème Tropézienne (pastry cream + buttercream)

* This is to avoid a skin forming on top, and the traditional way to do this is with plastic wrap pressed directly onto the surface of the cream. But I prefer reusable products whenever possible, so I use a silicone baking mat🛒 instead.

When baking something, whether sweet or savory, most plant milks are interchangeable, whereas stovetop cooking (soup, white sauce) requires a little more consideration. (Milk for drinking is considerably trickier since the flavor is so important, and that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

The two easiest milks to make are oat milk and what I call quick milk. For oat milk🍴, you don’t even have to soak the oats or strain the milk after - just blend rolled oats and water and you have milk. To make quick milk🍴, blend water with your favorite nut butter, and voilà.

The next easiest milk - and my personal favorite - is cashew milk🍴. Soak the nuts overnight, drain, and blend with fresh water for a creamy milk that is fantastic for things like Alfredo sauce🍴 - not only because of the wonderful taste and texture, but also because it thickens naturally when heated, so you don’t even need to make a roux. (I buy raw cashews in bulk🛒 and stash them in the freezer because I regularly make not only milk but also yogurt🍴 and cream cheese🍴.)

Almonds need to be blanched and soaked and almond milk🍴 needs to be strained, but the result is a mild and creamy milk that works well in any recipe. Same process for milk made from any other nut (pecans, peanuts, hazelnuts, Brazil) or seed (sunflower, sesame, hemp).

Coconut milk🍴 needs to be strained after blending, and also has a pronounced flavor that makes it less flexible than other milk recipes. It’s great in pumpkin-cream cheese muffins🍴 but probably not so good in mashed potatoes🍴.

The only milk I buy is soy milk🛒, because it’s the most time-consuming recipe🍴: soak, cook, and strain. (Though it’s not as creamy as cashew milk, I add soy milk to my coffee to get an extra bit of protein🙋‍♀️ in the morning.) You can make milk with other beans following the same recipe.

I haven’t made rice or quinoa milk yet, but again they are pretty simple: cook the grain, blend with water, strain.

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Discover more plant-based dairy recipes📋 at The Veggie Table.

I’ve cooked all my life and have been writing about food since 2002 when I created The Veggie Table. Like me, it was originally vegetarian and has gradually been converted to vegan over the years. It has always been pretty basic - mostly just recipes, very little personal information and certainly none of the “the day I created this recipe, my daughter was wearing a blue dress and my son had just lost his first tooth” storytelling that means scrolling through hundreds of lines of text before getting to the actual recipe. (No shade - if you like reading all that, you do you. But when I cook, I’m focused only on food and closely related facts.)

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Now I’m ready to do more - I want to talk more about technique and true vegan creativity. I’ll dive into that here at Vegan Technique, but I’ll still post the straight-forward recipes at The Veggie Table, so that you can learn and explore with me or dive right into the good stuff.