PGHV's Ongoing List of Good and Bad Alternative Restaurant Ingredients

Barebones outline follows:

Contents:

Milk, Butter, and Egg Alternatives

Vegan Cheeses

Vegan Ground "Beef"

Vegan "Beef" Medallions/Strips

Vegan "Chicken"

Vegan Sausages, Roasts, Franks, and Dogs

Vegan Suitable Sugars & Sweeteners

Vegan Substitutions for Fish & Oyster Sauces

Vegan Imitation Chicken & Beef Stock/Base

Milk, Butter, and Egg Alternatives

Milks:

Plant milks come from a variety of sources, with soy and rice being the most prevalent.  Many of these have added sugar and/or vanilla flavoring, which is to be avoided for cooking purposes.  When selecting a milk, look for the soymilk with the lowest amount of sugar-carbs, and with no vanilla.

Generally we only use the Silk brand organic, unsweetened soymilk, aka, Dark-Green-Carton Silk.

This is available at all Whole Foods markets, Market District Giant Eagle, and quite likely your current restaurant supplier, as Silk is owned by White Wave.

Red carton Silk brand "plain" soymilk is an acceptable 2nd choice, but is not as neutral as the unsweetened Silk, due to a couple more grams per serving of sugar.  This is not noticible in sweet dishes and baked goods.

Silk Unsweetened Organic Product Page

Tips for cooking with soymilk

Butter Analogs:

Good butter analogs will have the following qualities:  Low saturated & unsaturated fat (about 60% less than butter), no trans fat, and no casein.

Regular margarine is not suitable for vegetarians, nor are other mainstream oil blends such as "I can't believe it's not butter", luckily the prices for vegan-suitable butter analogs are in-line with butter and margarine prices.

The following butter analogs have been tested and endorsed by PGHV:

Earth Balance, all subtypes are suitable for vegans and vegetarians

Smart Balance vegan varieties: Organic, Light. All other varieties should be treated as not suitable for vegans.

Egg Substitutes:

Baking

Substituting eggs in baking (or any cooking not reliant upon whole-egg presentation) is trivial, and can be done with items on-hand in a reasonably well stocked restaurant kitchen.  If you would like to just use an off the shelf solution, Ener-G Egg Replacer is a well liked option, that is as shelf-stable as baking soda.  Further, at a retail price of about $6 for the equivalent of 100 eggs, there's really no reason not to use egg replacer for most dishes.

Omelettes

The best omelette I've made so far was achieved by using Fantastic Foods brand tofu scrambler and extra firm tofu mashed into paste with a potato masher.  After you've mashed the ingredients into a paste, cook as scrambled eggs for a few minuted, then spread & press the mixture into the bottom of a pan and cook like an egg omelette.

Scrambled Eggs