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How to Make Any Recipe Dairy-Free

Dairy is the easiest major allergen to substitute and the easiest to miss. The swaps themselves are well solved; the trouble is that dairy turns up in things that are not obviously dairy, and that one plant milk is not interchangeable with another.

Pick the substitute by what the dairy is doing

The hidden dairy list

This is where dairy-free cooking actually goes wrong. Check for:

Where the technique has to change

Dairy-free is not the same as lactose-free

Worth knowing if you are cooking for someone else. Lactose intolerance is a digestive issue with milk sugar, so lactose-free dairy products are fine. A milk allergy is an immune response to milk protein, so lactose-free milk is still dangerous. If you are cooking for an allergy rather than an intolerance, treat every item on the hidden-dairy list above as a real risk and read the label.

Doing it automatically

Skip the manual work · convert the recipe automatically →

Related: Dairy-Free Recipe Converter · Milk substitutes · Heavy cream substitutes · How to adapt any recipe