Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
You love a spread on your morning toast, but as a vegan, you know better than to use butter since it’s a dairy product. You wonder if margarine is the butter alternative you’ve been looking for. Is margarine vegan?
Margarine is often vegan, as it’s made of vegetable oil and water. That said, always check the ingredients list before buying and using margarine since it can sometimes contain milk products and non-vegan food coloring.
If you’ve used butter all your life until now, you may not be very familiar with margarine. In this article, we’ll discuss what margarine is, its nutrition, its ingredients, and why it’s often suitable for vegans. We’ll even discuss some other spreads you can use on your diet. Keep reading!
What Is Margarine?
Let’s start by talking about margarine, including what it is. Although it looks a lot like butter, the two products share different ingredients. Butter is comprised of inorganic salt, water, and cow’s milk, which becomes a cream when churned. It’s the latter ingredient that makes it unsuitable for the vegan diet.
Margarine is naturally dairy-free. As we touched on in the intro, its ingredients list is exceedingly simple. By combining water and vegetable oil, you get margarine. Which oils a manufacturer uses will vary, but the oils include olive, rapeseed, canola, cottonseed, soybean, palm, sunflower, corn, or safflower oils, sometimes even a mix.
To make margarine more palatable, manufacturers include artificial or natural flavors, salt, and sometimes coloring as well. After all, consumers expect margarine to be a uniform yellow color much like butter.
How is margarine made? Fats and oils undergo emulsification, combining them. Processes like hydrogenation, interesterification, and/or fractionation may occur as well.
With hydrogenation, a platinum, palladium, or nickel catalyst is introduced to help organic compounds better saturate. Interesterification is the process of fatty acids rearranging into a fat product. During fractionation, ingredients are separated and then divided.
These processes make one of three types of margarine: hard, soft, or liquid.
Hard margarine is for baking and cooking purposes only. It may come uncolored, in which case it will have a much lighter hue, almost whitish. This is the true color of margarine. The reason it’s colored these days is that when margarine first debuted for sale (sometime in the 1860s), people likened the original color to lard, which they thought was unappealing.
Soft margarine is the kind you see in the grocery store all the time. It’s spreadable and may contain high levels of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats depending on the oil source. Liquid margarine is sold in bottles and intended for baking and cooking preparation.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture or USDA, a tablespoon of margarine or 14.2 grams contains:
- 102 calories
- 11 grams of total fat (16 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 2 grams of saturated fat (11 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 6 grams of monounsaturated fat
- 1 grams of trans fat regulation
- 0 milligrams of cholesterol
- 0 milligrams of sodium
- 3 milligrams of potassium
- 1 grams of total carbs
- 0 grams of dietary fiber
- 0 grams of sugar
- 0 grams of protein
- 10 percent vitamin A
Nutritionally, it’s not that different from butter. Here is the USDA nutrition fact for one tablespoon of butter, which is the equivalent of 14.2 grams:
- 102 calories
- 12 grams of total fat (18 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 7 grams of saturated fat (35 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 4 grams of polyunsaturated fat
- 3 grams of monounsaturated fat
- 5 grams of trans fat regulation
- 31 milligrams of cholesterol (10 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 2 milligrams of sodium
- 3 milligrams of potassium
- 0 grams of carbs
- 0 grams of dietary fiber
- 0 grams of sugar
- 1 grams of protein
- 7 percent vitamin A
- 2 percent vitamin D
Can Vegans Eat Margarine?
A vegan friend of yours told you that margarine is made from animal fats and other animal sources. Is that true? It once was, yes. Beef fat, in the years that margarine was first sold, was a primary ingredient in this product. However, once people discovered ways to solidify vegetable oil, plant-based oils became the favored ingredient in margarine instead.
However, that doesn’t mean all margarine is vegan. Although the simplest ingredients used to produce margarine are water and vegetable oil, some milk derivatives can sneak their way in as well. If you see ingredients such as caseinate, casein, lactose, or whey on the ingredients list, then you have to stay away from that brand of margarine.
Caseinate or calcium caseinate is a milk protein that comes from one-percent milk and skim milk. It allows fats to break down in a food product. Casein, which sounds like the same thing but isn’t quite, is a dairy milk protein that’s also crucial in making cheese.
Lactose, a type of disaccharide, is the very ingredient you’re sensitive to if you have lactose intolerance. Whey is a water-like milk liquid that’s a remnant of curd formation. These are all animal products and byproducts and none are safe for the vegan diet.
What about the yellow color of margarine? Where does that come from? That’s another thing to be conscious of when shopping for margarine as a vegan. To produce artificial colors like bright reds, sunny yellows, grassy greens, and appealing blues, animals often undergo food color testing. These aren’t only lab rats used either, but dogs and rabbits too.
Some staunch vegans will avoid products with artificial food coloring, which often means foregoing a lot of food.
Vegan margarine brands use beta-carotene for color. This plant-based pigment is known for being in carrots, but fruits and fungi contain it too. It produces an orange or red hue that can be diluted to a pale yellow.
Smart Balance Light with Extra Virgin Olive Oil is one brand of margarine you can buy that’s vegan-friendly. Its ingredients include potassium sorbate, sorbitan ester of vegetable fatty acids, vegetable monoglycerides, vitamin D, color from beta-carotene, vitamin A palmitate, sunflower lecithin, artificial and natural flavors, salt, water, and an oil blend of soybean, flaxseed, and extra virgin olive oils.
Blue Bonnet’s 31 Percent Light Vegetable Oil Spread is another good margarine that vegans can use. The ingredients in this product are beta carotene for color, vitamin A palmitate, artificial and natural flavors, citric acid, calcium disodium EDTA, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, monoglycerides as an emulsifier, palm kernel oil, salt, maltodextrin, soybean oil, and water.
Does Margarine Taste Like Butter? Are They Interchangeable in Recipes?
You can confuse butter with margarine if you’re in a rush while grocery shopping. If you plan to use vegan margarine as a butter replacement going forward, does the similar look of these two spreadable products mean they’ll taste the same as well?
Actually, no. The saturated fats in butter do have a noticeable texture and taste that you will not get in margarine. Butter also contains cholesterol, which margarine is missing. Although the lack of this ingredient is healthier for you in the long run, not having cholesterol in margarine is yet another factor that influences the flavor.
If you’re having a hard time adjusting to margarine as a butter replacement, you don’t necessarily have to. We’ll talk in the next section about butter-free alternatives that have more of the texture and taste of butter but no dairy. Some are even cholesterol-free and slash the trans fats that both butter and margarine contain.
In the meantime, let’s assume that margarine is all you have. You want to whip up a vegan dish like pancakes or cookies. The recipe you’re using isn’t vegan, but you’ve subbed out all the non-vegan ingredients so far except for the butter.
Can you use margarine in place of butter? Yes, you can. Use the same quantity of margarine as you would butter. The only times in which a switch like this wouldn’t be appropriate is if the recipe says so.
That said, you do have to expect a different kind of cooking or baking result when you use margarine to replace butter. Your cookies won’t have the same kind of toothsome chewiness that butter gives them, and they will come out softer too, even if you bake them for the usual amount of time. Some bakers have found that cookies with margarine don’t brown or crisp up, so don’t use browning as a litmus test for whether your cookies should come out of the oven.
Vegan-Friendly Margarine and Butter Alternatives
We said we would, so let’s wrap up with a few vegan butter alternatives that ditch the dairy.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Vegan
As the name tells you, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! isn’t truly butter. Their vegan version contains omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid or ALAs, but it has no trans-fat, no preservatives, and no artificial flavors. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! reduces saturated fat by 70 percent compared to real butter.
The ingredients are beta carotene for color, vitamin A palmitate, vinegar, natural flavor, lecithin from soy, salt, palm kernel oil, palm oil, soybean oil, and purified water.
Miyoko’s European-Style Cultured Vegan Butter
The California-based Miyoko’s Creamery makes an awesome European-styled cultured vegan butter with just a touch of sea salt. Whether you want your butter to spread, bake delicious desserts, or brown up, this is the vegan product for you.
Here are the ingredients: sea salt, organic sunflower lecithin, organic sunflower oil, filtered water, cultured cashew milk with organic cashews and filtered water, and organic coconut oil.
Melt Organic Butter
Melt Organic produces plant-based cheesy spreads, salted and unsalted butter, oh, and probiotic butter as well. Their original organic butter is vegan, as it contains organic annatto extract color, tocopherols, natural flavor, sunflower lecithin, sea salt, water, and an organic oil blend with flaxseed, sunflower, canola, sustainable ethical palm fruit, and coconut oils.
Conclusion
Margarine can be vegan, but it depends. If the spread has any milk-based products, then you can’t use margarine. You also want to check for any artificial colors. The vegan alternatives we suggested in this article will give you all the satisfaction you get when baking or using margarine and butter but without dairy. It’s the best of both worlds!