Custard is a pretty easy product to find a vegan alternative for, there are quite a few options and you can usually find at least one ready made vegan custard in most supermarkets but if you can’t then I will show you a backup which you will definitely be able to find.
So the custard which we always have stocks of in our house and use the most is the Alpro dairy-free custard. It’s only about 90p a carton and one is more than enough for us all to have a big portion with our dessert. It is soya based so if you are avoiding that then the other two options might be better options. The other thing I would say is that it has a slight soya taste, not hugely noticeable but it is there. It’s absolutely fine once you’ve been vegan for a little while but if you are just switching and still have the memory of dairy custard then you might notice the difference. I found that heating it up made it less noticeable. I don’t want to put you off though because it is a great alternative.
Another great option is the Oatly custard, Matt described it as tasting like a mixture of custard and melted ice-cream! I taste test it in the video at the bottom of this post. It really tastes of vanilla and doesn’t have the soya taste as it’s oat based. It is slightly runnier in consistency to the Alpro but tastes amazing. In fact the only downside to this one for us is that the carton is a lot smaller than the Alpro so there isn’t quite enough for all for of us and it’s a little bit more expensive. If I didn’t have kids though then I would choose this option!
Then the last option is our backup as I always have a tin in the back of my cupboard and it’s Bird’s custard powder which is actually vegan. Obviously this depends on how you mix it up and also you need to make sure you don’t confuse it with their instant powder as I don’t believe that one is vegan. You need to make it up with a nice creamy milk, we use Oatly Barista. It takes a bit more time but it’s definitely the cheapest option and I really like it as I like warm custard, in fact I could just eat bowls of it!
So they are my top 3 vegan alternatives to custard and they are all great but although we use the Alpro one the most, I would actually say that the other two are my favourites taste-wise. None of them cost much though so it might be worth taste testing them all to see which you prefer. If I had to pick my top vegan alternative to custard then I would probably say the Oatly.
Here is the little video I made about vegan custard..
