Vegan or Vegetarian cookbook - no garlic or onions

August 21, 2020 5:21 AM

Vegan (preferred) or Vegetarian cookbook - NO garlic, onions or shallots, (or as few recipes with them as possible). I looked at Vegonomicon recently and it looks good but too many dishes use garlic or onions, which I don't like. I don't want to substitute shallots either. Less important, but I would also like to avoid fried and/or crisped recipes. Sauteeing is okay. Much thanks!
posted by rainy to Food & Drink (17 answers total)

Search for Jain recipes, which will not have garlic or onion. There's a lot out there!
posted by wellred at 5:36 AM on August 21, 2020 [10 favorites]

You may have luck searching for "low fodmaps vegan" recipes or "vegan IBS" recipes.
Here's one: http://www.ibsvegan.com/cookbook-220089.html
posted by i_mean_come_on_now at 5:36 AM on August 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. If I remember correctly, it's 100% garlic and onion free. Vegetarian, though there are vegan recipes (and many can be adapted); I'm sure there are recipes for fried food but it's *enormous* (~800 pages) and you could probably cook from it for years without missing them.
posted by pullayup at 5:37 AM on August 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

The Moosewood Cookbook has quite a variety of vegetarian/vegan recipes, many of them without garlic, onions, or shallots.
posted by El_Marto at 5:39 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: No experience with either the book or the recipes, but Manjula's Kitchen has been a popular video series online for years and she has a book out. She cooks without onions or garlic (personal preference, apparently). It's only in ebook form, though.
posted by trig at 5:39 AM on August 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Jain recipes are definitely a good way to go, as wellred mentioned! I came across them after one of my family members stopped eating onions.

Here's a few online collections to check out: Jain Vegans, 400 Jain Recipes, Spice Up the Curry... I'm sure there are some good recipe books as well.
posted by rambling wanderlust at 5:48 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Seconding Lord Krishna's Cuisine. The recipes are great, but the sections on ingredients and cooking techniques are worth the price of the book just in themselves.
posted by Weftage at 5:50 AM on August 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Quick note about adapting onion/garlic-free recipes from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora: many will call for hing/asafoetida. I think it would be reductve to call it an "onion substitute" but to my palate it contributes similar flavors. So, if the flavor is a thing you object to, skip the hing, or use it cautiously.
posted by pullayup at 6:06 AM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Another vote for Lord Krishna's Cuisine.
posted by jadepearl at 6:08 AM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

The very first vegetarian/vegan cookbook I was ever given--the Higher Taste--has a lot of onion/garlic-free material in it. That said, it's a slim volume with a fairly, shall we say, simple and international approach, and the first half is recipe-free discussion about the motivation for cooking/eating without meat from a Hare Krishna perspective. You can avoid that by viewing the recipes here. As others have said, you best best is looking to Indian/Pakistani cookbooks that are targeted at religious communities that seek to avoid these ingredients.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:25 AM on August 21, 2020

Best answer: nthing Lord Krishna's cuisine. Vaishnavs in India (my community being one), do not use Onions and Garlic. But a lot of dairy, though. As Krishna was a cowherd!

Traditional South Indian TamBram cooking is free of it too. Although most South Indian cookbooks do use Onions as the restrictions on this is not followed by my community. Except during religious festivals and rituals; those things are still onion/garlic free.
posted by indianbadger1 at 11:02 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Korean Temple Food Is delicious. And seconding fodmap as a search term if you aren’t already using it.
posted by J.R. Hartley at 1:16 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nthing Lord Krishna's Cuisine and decent books on Jain cooking.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:56 PM on August 21, 2020

To avoid onions, garlic, and shallots is to avoid alliums, so another search term is allium free recipe.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:30 PM on August 21, 2020

I had a cookbook from Kurma many years ago and I think it was just what you're looking for.
posted by bink at 5:50 PM on August 22, 2020

Can't you just use common sense to substitute or omit as appropriate?

You don't need to rule out a huge proportion of recipes when many are flexible enough.
posted by turkeyphant at 8:43 PM on August 22, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers, I've started watching Manjula's kitchen videos and really like them, and will order the Lord Krishna book.
posted by rainy at 11:45 AM on August 25, 2020