Sweet + Salty: The Art of Vegan Chocolates, Truffles, Caramels, and More from Lagusta's Luscious

"Lagusta Yearwood has a chocolate shop in New Paltz, New York called Lagusta Luscious. It’s been growing exponentially for the last 10 years. This book is all about chocolate confections. She has the most incredible approach to vegan sweets because it’s just obsessive. It’s not just a cupcake or a cookie. It’s truffles, it’s decadence. It’s a caramel that’s flavored with sorel or with seasonal herbs. I think there’s a lemon-rosemary caramel truffle. Then there are also some more approachable recipes in the book. She makes the best chocolate ganache. If you want to make vegan chocolate ganache, her recipe is the absolute best. I have it committed to memory. It is something you can take out of your back pocket all the time and impress people. Just throw it in a shortbread crust and everyone will be very excited with you. Her approach is super important in terms of this evolution of vegan cuisine that we’ve seen over the last two or three decades because she drills down into the technique, rather than being obsessed with the ideology. It’s in the technique that you see the possibilities. In her book, she shows you how to make really rich caramel, really rich truffles with all of these flavors that are standard in an omnivorous kitchen. Vegan sweet cookbooks tend to focus on nostalgia and nostalgic flavors, showing you how you can have the same birthday cake you had in 1990, but vegan. What she shows you is that you can actually take things to a new level without animal products and using very ethical, well-sourced chocolate. She’ll show you how to make candy canes and lots of other stuff. But the idea here, again, is that you can do vegan stuff at a really high level, at a really technique-driven level, and have it be exciting. Lagusta, with her chocolate shop, has really changed the game. She put out a chocolate bar that was called the ‘Pig-Out Bar’, which had smoked yuba—this was when bacon was all the rage. She smoked yuba, which is a by-product of soy milk, and then put that in a chocolate bar. It’s just super high-level weird stuff that she does. In the book, you get that and you get her personality and her story, which is super interesting. She went to the Natural Gourmet Institute. She was doing a meal service and started making truffles on the side and it just took over her life. Then she had a chocolate shop, she had this cafe. They’re opening a big factory now. I feel this book, Sweet + Salty , came out at a moment in time when she’s been able to package her approach so it could be really influential not only to people who want to do vegan sweets, but also to vegan business owners who want to approach things in a different way because she also writes a lot about her approach to the business. There are recipes that are easier and there are recipes that are harder, but I think that’s true of any cookbook . It depends on your experience working with sugar or chocolate, whether it’s going to be an easy thing or a hard thing to do. A person who makes truffles every Christmas is going to have an easier time switching to vegan truffles, obviously. If you’ve never made a caramel before, working with sugar is really hard. So that’ll take some trial and error. People don’t factor in the significance of cumulative experience and of trial and error. If you’re going to cook, you have to fuck up a lot to get better at it. It’s the attention and the effort that you bring to it that counts. Cookbooks are important for teaching you not how to cook, but how to think and how to bring new techniques to ingredients and how to approach what’s in your own kitchen in new ways. When you go to a cookbook, and your approach is ‘just give me things to do, and I’ll do them’ that’s going to help you become a better cook. That’s going to solidify you in terms of ability. That’s why I picked these cookbooks. There are two that are really approachable for the home cook and then the other ones are ones that redefine, in my perspective, how vegan cuisine is thought of, how it’s evolved. I have a book coming out next year which is about the history of plant-based food in the US. When I look at all the cookbooks that have come out—and vegan cookbooks have been huge for the last 20 years—I see a sea change that’s really compelling, from making the case for veganism to doing a book on confectionery technique. Over the last two decades, we’ve seen that shift from, ‘I’m going to convince you that it’s okay sometimes not to eat a steak,’ to ‘We know that it’s okay sometimes not to eat a steak. And here’s how to actually serve a beautiful vegan centerpiece, entree and complex vegan dessert. Maybe you don’t even have to tell people it’s vegan.’ We’ve really come a long way and all these books are really significant forces and changing that narrative around what it means to primarily eat vegetables and what that can look and taste like. There’s a lot of focus on comfort food historically, in vegan cookbooks. For me, that’s what I want to get away from. It’s all a bit too easy, a bit too banal. To me, it’s important to show that we’ve come from tofu ricotta and comfort foods or cupcakes, to making your own butter at home and making meringue from flax seeds to doing really high-end chocolate work and sugar work with butter and without heavy cream. That’s a really interesting trajectory. Obviously, the raw cookbook is an outlier. But I do think it’s interesting to show as well, how, historically, high-end chefs have done this work. The people who are famous for cooking steak have also been doing a lot of compelling stuff with vegetables. That gets forgotten a lot in narratives of vegan cuisine. 11 Madison Park in New York City went plant-based, and everyone was like, ‘Wow, this is such a new thing,’ but it wasn’t. Reframing how people think of these things as not just a new fad but something with a lot of precedent and a lot of technique behind it is important. There is a lot of ingredient-driven thoughtfulness behind it. That’s a really important part of changing how people think about plant-based eating."