When it comes to things culinary, some dairy things can be substituted for with relative success.
Other things cannot.
Fluid milk is in the first category. Soy milk, nut milks, and seed milks can do a pretty darned good job of substituting for liquid milk in nearly all situations.
Butter is also pretty easy to substitute for. Ghee or clarified butter is an option for many people. But if it isn’t, or if its more assertive flavor wouldn’t work as well, there are many different plant oils that will work wonderfully. Pastries can be made with leaf lard to fine advantage. And there are hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and various kinds of margarines, which I list last because I like them least.
In the second category, the things for which there are no good substitutes, is cheese. I’ve tried the vegan cheeses. Some of them are in fact edible. But they are not, emphatically not, cheese. Anyone who tells you they’re the same, or “so close you won’t be able to tell the difference,” has a palate made of purest tin. Either that or they’ve been vegan so long they’ve forgotten what cheese is supposed to taste like. I’m sorry, it’s just true. Cheese is sui generis and there is nothing that replaces it adequately.
There are some things you can slip into sandwiches and burritos and such that will give the same unctuous, rich, yielding quality of cheese. Avocado and guacamole are fantastic, silken tofu “ricotta” is sometimes a nice touch, hard boiled egg yolk is also very good in some things. But none of these have the tang or the body of cheese, nor the saltiness, and certainly none of the specific flavors that come from the various bacteria that act on the cheeses are present in the substitutes.
Liquid cream is difficult to substitute. There are nondairy creamers and some of them will work in some applications and others will work in other applications. Coconut cream can be used in ice creams, panna cottas and other custardy type dishes, ganaches, and similar sweet applications but it does bring a coconut flavor along for the ride. Condensed soy milk can also work, depending on what you want to do with it. It’s also easy, since it just requires boiling down some (unsweetened, unflavored) soy milk until it is thick enough to get the job done. I know some people also have success with extremely rich nut milks, but I haven’t experimented with these. I have tried a product called Mimicreme, and have not been thrilled by it. I suspect it would be great for ice creams, but I wasn’t pleased with it on berries, that’s for sure.
Whipped cream, however, is not possible with either coconut cream or condensed soy milk. There are, yes, nondairy whipped toppings, e.g. Cool Whip. I don’t care for them or the plasticky smeary mouthfeel they leave behind, but sometimes they have a use just the same, especially if you aren’t as put off by the texture issue as I. But for the most part, if you can’t have dairy you just can’t have whipped cream. (It’s a tough one. Not as tough as cheese, though.)
Yogurt is difficult partly because so many American yogurt companies cannot seem to make decent yogurt in the first place, and partly because American yogurt companies cannot fathom the idea of yogurt without sugar. I prefer yogurt to be unsweetened, and like to use it in savory applications better than sweet ones, so this is a problem for me. I have found one, and only one, brand of commercially-available soy yogurt that is unsweetened, and it is Wildwood’s Soyogurt in the plain unsweetened version. It has a decent texture, although to me it tries a bit too hard. I get the sense that they are adding a lot of inulin to produce a smooth texture through a fiber suspension, and it comes off to me as a bit artificial, almost plasticky. I have not had good results with it for labneh or Greek-style strained yogurts, and I suspect that the high-fiber texture trick is why. Every once in a while I think I should experiment with making my own soy yogurt to see if I could do better. Maybe I really ought to.
I have never found a source for non-dairy kefir. I would adore one, and one for non-dairy ayran or dhalla, both of which I love, as well. I know that some people make non-dairy kefir at home with kefir grains to get the fermentation rolling, but I haven’t experimented with it. Another thing I ought to try!
