The first thing to remember when choosing a spread is that unless it says on the box that it contains no dairy products, it probably isn’t safe no matter how harmless the ingredients may look. Remember that many ordinary margarines contain skimmed milk powder as a bulking and binding agent.
There is a range of dairy-free spreads out there. Many are only available from health food shops, which makes them both inconvenient and expensive.
Pure Dairy-Free Spread
This is the one which we tend to use most of the time. The sunflower one is pleasant to eat on bread (butter eaters don’t usually object to it unless they see it being used!) and it works well in sauces and general cooking/baking. I don’t use it for are making pastry and crumble topping : Tomor works better. For cakes, puddings etc. I use either, depending on what I have in the fridge and whether or not the recipe works better with a hard or soft texture margarine.
The key thing with Pure spread is that it comes in three different varieties: the sunflower one which is perfectly pleasant, the soya one which tastes of soya (doesn’t rock my boat) and the organic one which this household voted as “Yuk!”. The sunflower one is in a yellow box, the soya one is green and the organic one is blue.
The Pure spread is readily available in most supermarkets and health food shops. If it isn’t in your local one, keep pestering customer services: they can sometimes be persuaded to give it at least a trial run. All you have to do then is to buy lots of it!
Of the specialist spreads from health food shops, there is a Granose one which is palatable (if a little flat tasting), but rather expensive. It’s soya based. There are also several sunflower oil spreads out there.
Hard Margarines
There are some block margarines out there which are edible, but you have to know where to look. Hard margarine is my favoured option over dairy-free spread for making pastry and crumble topping. It goes into the breadcrumb stage much more effectively than dairy-free spread because it is hard.
Rakusens Tomor
This one’s the bee’s knees. It’s a hard margarine designed for baking, and works brilliantly. It’s sometimes hard to find, though. Your best bet is to find a supermarket in an area with a high Jewish population, as it’s kosher.
Where to get it: Waitrose/Ocado, some Sainsbury’s, Jewish delicatessens.
Sainsbury’s own brand hard margarine
Hard to find at times other than around Christmas: it seems people only bake at this time of the year these days. The good news is that it keeps for ages in the fridge and it freezes well. I stock up each year and keep my eyes open in case a batch comes in out of season
Where to get it: Sainsbury’s
Gotchas: Don’t use it on bread if you run out of dairy-free spread: not nice!.