I’m trying to teach myself how to cook and I don’t know enough to be able to tell when information on the internet is accurate. I have a box of pancake mix and I’d like to replace the cow milk with some kind of plant milk. The vibe of cooking sites is vaguely spammy, and I can’t tell if they are misinformation or not. Cooking is a high effort activity for me so I need to know if something is mostly going to work before I attempt it.
Where do you go to find information that is accurate and comprehensive?
I’d like to chime in with the recommendation to generally not veganify non-vegan recipes. You are taking a recipe that is designed with ingredients having certain characteristics, and substituting some of those ingredients with slightly different ones. If the original recipe has been tuned to be as close to perfection as possible, then your altered version cannot be as good.
And then again, a recipe designed as vegan from ground up has all the ratios between different ingredients, and the choices of ingredients designed to really fit well together.
My personal experience is that vegan food that is slightly different but takes the best out of the ingredients available can often be better than its non-vegan counterpart. You get better results by at most taking inspiration from the non-vegan foods and then creating something of your own than by trying to do something with altered ingredients.
But of course: This is the way for perfection. It assumes you are a gourmet magician or that you have extremely good recipes available somewhere. It can really often bring you very adequate results to just emulate a non-vegan recipe. I am sorry I am unable to directly help you with that; but I feel it might be useful to you if I tried pushing you a bit towards the direction of making the best of your ingredients and seeing what comes out of that :)
The best vegan foods I have eaten have all been such that you simply couldn’t sensibly make them using any non-vegan ingredients.
Good luck cooking, in any case!