Batch cooking vegan
Batch cooking, or meal prep, is a practice that appeared in the United States in the 2000s. It allows you to anticipate your daily meals by cooking only once at the weekend. In 2-3 hours your meals are ready to be eaten for the rest of the week.
According to a study by IFOP, 58% of French people are fans of batch cooking and increasingly of vegan batch cooking. This trend is relieving thousands of households from the hectic pace of their daily lives. In addition to saving a considerable amount of time, this practice makes it possible to eradicate snacking between meals, save money, avoid food waste and consume healthy products!
In short, a compendium of undeniable benefits that will undoubtedly relieve the mental burden of that phrase dreaded by so many parents: "I'm hungry, what shall we eat tonight?"
Vegan Food Club and vegan batch cooking: a perfect combo for a week full of flavours!
Batch cooking every weekend certainly saves you time for the rest of the week, but it can be complicated to manage if your weekend is busy, you have a large family, or you have to prepare all your lunch and dinner meals in advance.
And that's where Vegan Food Club comes in! By subscribing to Vegan Food Club, no more unbalanced and unpalatable meals for lunch (or dinner). Enjoy exclusive recipes prepared with love by our chefs. Chop suey with tofu, Navratan korma, Pasta alla norma... enough to make your mouth water! Vegan Food Club has a special Veganuary offer: 30% off your first 3 orders with the code BVEGAVFC. So take advantage and combine vegan batch cooking and VFC for quality meals all week long.
4 tips to be a professional batch cooker
The key to successful meal prep is organisation. If you start batch cooking without having prepared everything you need beforehand, you can be sure that this session will end in a giant fiasco with identical meals for the whole week, which will put you off the practice!
1. Knowing the number of dishes you want in advance
Do you want to make your lunch? Both? Do you want to prepare your vegetables and marinades in advance, but not compose your dishes directly? For how many people?
These questions seem to be the beaba but are useful for writing an effective shopping list.
2. Having a shopping list
If you think that having a shopping list is a waste of time, you are very wrong! Thinking about the ingredients on your plate beforehand saves a lot of time in the supermarket and in the kitchen! No more wandering around the aisles looking for inspiration and letting an impulse buy ruin your budget, the shopping list is your best ally against food and budget waste.
First, take an inventory of the food in your cupboards to avoid ending up with 4 kg of flour and then categorise the necessary purchases by department.
As a reminder, ingredients are the lifeblood of batch cooking. Don't hesitate to choose similar ingredients, as this will reduce your cooking and preparation time. For a balanced vegetable dish, your plate should contain :
50% mixed vegetables
25% vegetable protein
25% wholegrain
Make sure you respect this balance in order to have healthy meals that will allow you to fill up on energy for the whole week! Check out the seasonal fruit and vegetable calendars for inspiration and to find out which plant proteins to use, stay with us until the end of the article!
3. Have the right artillery
Have you ever seen a hairdresser without scissors or a salesman without a telephone? The answer is definitely no! So to be a professional batch cooker, the same rule applies. Frying pans, saucepans, spatulas, mandolin, peeler, maryse... Make sure you have everything you need to cook efficiently.
To cook responsibly, choose :
silicone baking mats instead of the traditional disposable baking paper
glass tupperware to store your food
vegan food wrappers made from rice wax to store any leftovers
airtight glass jars for your soups, pickles or sauces
4. Respecting the preservation of food
In order not to waste the dishes you have carefully concocted, it is important to know how long they can be kept. While homemade soups can be kept for several days (3 to 5 days), raw vegetables such as avocados, carrots or cucumbers will tend to oxidise more quickly (about 2 days).
If you serve your dishes with a green salad, wait until the same day to put the dressing on. Similarly, if you are preparing an avocado, cut it up on the spot or, if this is not possible, cover it with lemon juice so that it does not turn brown.
If you are worried about the preservation of your dishes, don't hesitate to freeze them! Soups, noodles, fried rice, gratins and other dishes keep very well in the freezer. We advise you to take your dishes out of the freezer and put them in the fridge a day before eating them so that they can defrost gently.
Batch cooking... but Vegan !
Now that you have the keys to becoming a professional batch cooker, traditional meal prep is fun, but the vegan version is even better! There is still time to participate in Veganuary by eating 100% plant-based dishes! Vegan batch cooking is a great way to be organised in your meal preparation and not to stress at the last minute by not knowing what to take from the supermarket for a healthy and balanced vegan meal.
Ideas for vegan dishes
Tofu, tempeh, imitation meat, fake cheese, plant-based milks, the rise of plant-based alternatives is such that you'll have no trouble replacing animal-based ingredients with an equally tasty alternative.
Here are some delicious vegan recipe ideas for your vegan batch cooking weeks. If you're a beginner in this field, don't hesitate to visit vegan blogs that offer step-by-step recipes to guide you as well as instagram accounts.
In the gratin category, a seasonal cauliflower gratin with vegetable lardons and vegetable béchamel. Sprinkle your cauliflower with all kinds of spices (smoked paprika, cumin...) then make a vegetable roux with soya milk and margarine. For more deliciousness, caramelise some vegetable lardons and sprinkle your gratin with faumage. Serve it with a green salad and you're done! By cooking a certain amount of cauliflower beforehand, you could, for example, concoct a cauliflower, potato and mushroom soup accompanied by a slice of faumage or homemade hummus. Perfectly regressive for a winter month! Then a burrito with the rest of the potatoes and mushrooms accompanied by red beans and an avocado sauce. These same red beans that you can use in a chili sin carne or chickpeas in a curry etc...
You get the idea, with a few ingredients you can make a multitude of dishes that will make your weekday meals anything but boring!