What to Do With Vegan Condensed Milk
Explorations of a nostalgic ingredient + a simple recipe for vegan salted peanut butter chocolate fudge
When I was growing up, we seemed to always have condensed milk in the pantry; the mysterious, small cans would sit on the shelves until the fall when we would break them out for annual pie-making. My mom would break open the can and while her back was turned, I would sneakily lick the lid to get a taste of the sickly sweet, syrupy milk. She would then open the cans of pumpkin puree, crack eggs, add spices, and I would mix everything into a smooth, golden mixture and pour it into a pre-made graham cracker pie shell. The pie was about as far as you can get from homemade, but it was still our tradition.
I’ve since learned you can definitely make pumpkin pie sans condensed milk, and actually sans animal products entirely. I’ve mastered some delicious vegan desserts without having condensed milk in my vegan pantry and so when I came across vegan condensed milk recently I initially wrote it off, but decided to buy a couple cans to see what I could do with it.
