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This New Vegan Butter Tastes More Like Butter Than Butter

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Plant-based diet acolytes are often branded as virtuous, but dammit, that doesn't mean they can't get down with a flaky croissant or a super-rich cookie. Fortunately for pastry-loving vegans or anyone looking to cut down on animal fats, there's a new vegan butter on the market that has even dedicated dairy fiends fooled: Fora Foods' FabaButter.

Vegan butter—aka margarine—is nothing new, but the Fora Foods founders felt like nothing on the market compared to, well, actual butter in terms of taste, texture and cooking properties. And, for the record, they grew up slathering the real stuff on their toast, so they had a strong attachment to the butter they loved as kids.

The key ingredient is aquafaba (which, we'll be honest, we learned about on The Great British Baking Show's Vegan Week): the thick liquid you find in a can of chickpeas. It's commonly used as an egg white substitute, and its unique properties are what help bind together the other ingredients (coconut cream and seasoning) and make the whole thing mimic dairy-based butter.

We recently tried the new vegan apple pie from NYC's Petee's Pie Company, which uses FabaButter in its crust. French bakery chain Maman also uses it in a vegan version of its megapopular chocolate-chip cookies, and the chefs at Saxon+Parole and Avant Garden are fans. It's currently available by the tub at Eataly—and we have a feeling it'll start popping up at more grocery stores soon.

We're not vegan, but we were all about the pie crust's impressive flakiness and super-buttery taste. And a vegan coworker gave his seal of approval via Slack: "Vegan pie crust is suuuuper hard and this one is doooope." Take it from those enthusiastically elongated words—this stuff is the real deal. 

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Editor

From 2016-2019 Carolyn Kuang-chen Stanley held the role of Editor covering food, travel and all things nyc.