Why is vegan better for our CO2 impact?
Have you ever thought about how your food has a lot of impact on your carbon footprint? The vegan apple crumble cake is a perfect example, why it is good to replace animal products with plant based products as often as you can.
Everything we eat has some type of CO2 impact on nature. Some more and some less. To change your personal carbon footprint for the better, the big steps aren’t the easiest to do. So better start small. For example by switching some ingredients in your meals. Just changing one or two ingredients can make a big difference.
For instance, the whole vegan apple crumble cake, which uses only plant based products and alternatives, has a carbon footprint of 2.785g CO2e. The same cake with animal products, like butter and eggs, has a carbon footprint of 4.762g CO2e. Almost double of the CO2 impact! That’s crazy, right?!
In the recipe for the vegan apple crumble cake, I switched out eggs with banana. Since the banana becomes a sticky mass when made into a puree, it is the perfect alternative for eggs in dough. The dough sticks together really well and doesn’t taste like banana if it’s not too old and brown. So why not use bananas instead of eggs?
The second item that I changed is the butter. Instead of dairy butter you can use plant based butter like Margarine. It gives the dough the same moisture and doesn’t taste any different. But the CO2 impact is clearly visible! With bananas and butter the cake has an impact of 3.102g CO2e. With banana and margarine instead of butter the cake has a CO2 impact of only 1.767g CO2e. Again, almost half the CO2 impact by only switching one ingredient.
As you can see, changing one or two ingredients is a simple way to reduce your carbon footprint without giving up delicious food. So we invite you to try it out for yourself and see how delicious this vegan apple crumble cake is. I believe after that you will be choosing CO2 friendly alternatives more often.
But now to the recipe.
Ingredients:
400g flour
100g sugar
1 small banana
200g margarine (plant based)
8 Apples
3 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
Let’s start with the very simple dough. Take a medium sized bowl and smash your banana to a mush. In the next step you just add the flour, sugar, vegetable butter and knead it to a smooth, well-mixed dough. The baking tin should have a diameter of 28 cm or close to that. Take the tin and spread some oil all over the inside. Now press 3/4 of the dough onto the bottom and sides of the tin.
For the apple-cinnamon- compote, peel and core the apples and cut into medium sized pieces. Put the pieces in a saucepan with some water, 3 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and heat it up. Stir the mixture once in a while to make sure that nothing sticks to the bottom of the saucepan. After around 20 minutes it should have formed a pulpy mixture and almost all water should be gone.
Now spread the finished apple-cinnamon- compote evenly on the dough. Almost done. Just crumble the rest of the dough over the apple-cinnamon- compote. To bake the cake, preheat your oven on 180 degrees (top and bottom heat). After 20 minutes the dough should look partially golden brown and very delicious.
I hope you enjoy the cake and please let us know what you think.
