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Delicious Vegan Indian Recipes

Enjoy an amazing meal with these vegan Indian recipes! You can cook Indian food at home, choose one or more of these dishes to cook and get started!

Vegan Indian Recipes roundup, collage of sindhi vegetable biryani, dal makhani, naan

Indian food has a great reputation for vegetarian eating, but isn’t as friendly to vegans. With cream, butter, and ghee in just about everything at Indian restaurants, it can be a challenge to figure out just what’s ok on the menu!

Luckily these ingredients are easy to work around when cooking at home thanks to ingredients like cashew cream, coconut milk, vegan butter, coconut oil, and tofu!

Now if you do want to go out for Indian food, you certainly can order vegan food. Just make sure to order dishes without cream and ask for no ghee to be added to your food.

And if you can find a South Indian restaurant, chances are a lot more of the menu is already vegan!

A Proper Sindhi Indian Meal:

I grew up with Sindhi Indian culture, and in Sindhi traditions if you’re serving an Indian dinner it must include:

  1. A dal, also spelled daal or dhal. This dal can be ‘wet,’ meaning soupy, or ‘dry,’ or thicker–containing little to no liquid at the end of cooking.
  2. A dry subzi. Subzi means vegetable dish, and dry just means that there is little to no liquid left at the end of cooking!
  3. A wet subzi. This refers to a vegetable dish that is more of a stew consistency.
  4. Rice. This is going to be basmati rice, and it can be plain rice, jeera rice (rice made with cumin), saffron rice, or a simple rice pulao with some lentils or vegetable.
  5. Flatbread. This could be something like chapati, naan, puri, paratha (pronounced parantha in my house), or roti.
  6. Yogurt, or dahi. You want fresh, thick, tangy yogurt for the most traditional experience. It can be served plain or it can be jazzed up to make raita. This is a cooling counterpart to the spicy dishes.

There are exceptions to these ‘rules’ of course. For example, if I made a biryani, the meal isn’t going to include 5 other dishes! And a dish like kofta might replace one of the subzi dishes.. or all of the dishes but rice or bread.

And when I’m cooking an Indian meal for myself and my husband it doesn’t usually include all of these! We’ll often just make one or two recipes with some rice and enjoy that for dinner (and the leftovers for lunch/future dinners!). But if you ever want to impress, then tick off a recipe from each of these categories. ?

Indian meals are best served family style so are perfect for big family dinners or any dinner party.

Enjoy any of these vegan Indian recipes on their own or alongside any other!

Incredible Vegan Indian Recipes

Enjoy a delicious Indian meal without the dairy, meat, and eggs with these vegan recipes!

For Some Indian-Inspired Recipes

Indian food doesn't have to be traditional! Enjoy the flavors of curry in some of these recipes.

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Afton Jackson

Monday 15th of June 2020

I'm the person who mainly cooks for the family and I want to incorporate all kinds of healthy meals in our daily menu. Your example of Indian dumplings in curry tomato sauce was very attractive to make because my wife does some home gardening in her spare time and she's recently grown some tomatoes that can be used for this recipe, making it extra fresh. I'll be sure to look for other places to try out Indian recipes before having my own attempts at them. Thank you!

Debbi

Saturday 16th of May 2020

Wonderful, perfect recipes! I am pleased to announce my SUCCESS while following your instructions, unlike a lot of other sites! I tried the pizza recipe, which came out perfect, now I can't wait to try some of the others!

Kenmiller

Thursday 21st of November 2019

Wow! pics are attractive. I want to taste above all dishes.

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