This easy vegan turmeric cookie recipe is aimed at those who both love the flavour of this vibrant rhizome and aren't monsters who don't eat sugar. The earthy, musky notes of turmeric pair well with other warming spices like cinnamon and nutmeg also used in the recipe. If you're a spice cookie devotee, I have a feeling you'll enjoy this.
A few notes about turmeric
Turmeric, a member of the ginger family, is a rhizome. Rhizomes are underground plant stems that grow horizontally. They have nodes that grows shoots from the top surface and roots from the lower surface.
Believed to be native to India and/or Southeast Asia (the precise origin isn't known), India is where the majority is cultivated today. Turmeric is also commonly used and grown elsewhere, including Thailand, where it's most commonly consumed in the North and South.
Fresh turmeric is boiled and dried to process it into ground turmeric. You can also buy whole pieces of dried turmeric.
Supplement companies would have you believe otherwise, but evidence turmeric has anti inflammatory properties that benefit us is profoundly weak.
The recipe for these vegan turmeric cookies was inspired by a formula translated from a Thai food magazine, not by any magical beliefs in turmeric. If you're searching for a healthy turmeric cookie with mystical healing anti inflammatory properties then let me remind you cookie is not a unit of language that harmonises with words like "healthy." These turmeric cookies contain heaps of fat and sugar because they are meant to taste nice. And who cares? Enjoy a treat. Have a salad tomorrow if you want. Or don't.
Finally, turmeric has a colour-changing reaction with alkaline substances such as the baking soda in thie recipe. This is why your cookies may be more orange-red when you break one open.
Vegan turmeric cookie ingredients
For these cookies, I used dried turmeric I bought in Mae Hong son, in Northern Thailand. The flavour is potent, more akin to raw turmeric than powder, and the colour orange with a hint of green. It's unlike turmeric you'll find in the UK (which is predominantly madras turmeric from India), but either works in this recipe.
The amount of turmeric used may seem too much, especially given the bitter notes of this spice, but rest assured the sugar counters this so what you're left with is the pleasant woody and herbal notes.
With regards to the fat, I used the solid unsalted butter block from Flora. Since I've not made the turmeric cookies with margarine yet, I don't know if it would work as well.
Storage
Store the cookies either sealed in a tin or tupperware or in a plastic bag. They'll keep for awhile. They'll keep for at least a week. Maybe longer? I wouldn't know because they don't last that long in my house, not with my sweet tooth.
Vegan Turmeric Cookies
Equipment
- Hand held mixer
Ingredients
- 130 grams all purpose flour
- 1 tablespoon dried ground turmeric
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
- 115 grams unsalted vegan butter (block, not margarine) I used Flora brand
- 130 grams white sugar
- 1 tablespoon powdered egg replacer mixed with 2 tablespoons water
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Line two baking trays with baking parchment.
- Whisk the flour, turmeric, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and ginger together in a bowl.
- Use a handheld beater to whip the butter, sugar, egg replacer (plus water), and vanilla extract in a separate bowl. Do this for 1-2 minutes.
- Add the flour blend half at a time and beat just until the dough is uniform.
- Scoop 1 tablespoon rounds of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, about 2 inches apart. Bake for 13-15 minutes, until cookies are firm around the edges.
- Remove from oven and leave to cool on the sheet, if possible. If you have more dough and need to continue baking, you can shift some of the cookies to a wire rack to cool.
Norma Payne says
Hi, I look forward to making this recipe. Would you mind sharing your source for the comment that the evidence for turmeric as an anti-inflammatory is "profoundly weak?"
Kip says
I read papers and lit reviews from time to time to see if any of the claims are up to scratch on a practical level and over the years have yet to come across any good research (good as in funded by a an impartial entity, with a reasonable sample size, with sensible methodology, peer reviewed, good sample size, etc...) that can unequivocally state the amount of turmeric we might manage to consume makes a statistically significant difference. I'm open to evidence that states otherwise. That's the wonderful thing about science – it can and does prove itself wrong.
I reserve the right to improve malicious and trollish comments.