Vegan Indian food is one of the best foods to make when cooking at home and it’s possible to find great vegan options while dining out at Indian restaurants as well.
Indian food is typically served family-style on a Thali, a round platter holding various dishes of entrees. You eat with your hands by ripping off pieces of Indian flatbread called roti and using it to pick up portions of the entrees.
Because dairy is such a large part of Indian culture, it can be tricky ordering vegan at an Indian restaurant, but there are still plenty of options available to you. Many Indian restaurants are familiar with preparing vegan dishes.
In Indian culture it’s considered bad manners to use your left hand to eat food, so stick to using your right hand (unless you have any physical limitations preventing you from doing so).
Staple Indian Foods & Dishes
Staple vegan Indian foods include rice, lentils, split peas, chickpeas, millet, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, okra, eggplant, bay leaves, mint, saffron, spinach, turmeric, coriander, cardamom, cumin, fennel, asafoetida, ginger, cinnamon, and cayenne.
Indian Food Glossary
- Aloo = potatoes
- Chana = chickpeas
- Dal = lentils
- Gosht = meat (usually lamb or goat)
- Kofta = ground meat (usually lamb or goat)
- Lassi = yogurt-based drink
- Masala = spice mix
- Murgh = chicken
- Paneer = cheese
- Raita = yogurt-based sauce
- Saag = any leaf-based dish (usually spinach)
- Tandoori = anything prepared in a Tandoor oven
- Tikka = marinade made with yogurt
Knowing certain Indian words can really help you determine what is safe to eat and what isn’t when looking over a menu at an Indian restaurant or a recipe in a food blog.
Knowing these words will help you determine that Saag Paneer translates to Spinach with Cheese and should be avoided (if ordering at a restaurant) or veganized (if cooking at home).
Dining Out at an Indian Restaurant
Dining out at an Indian restaurant can be tricky as a vegan because butter and ghee have a way of finding their way into virtually every dish, but there are still plenty of options available. Menus are often separated into meat-based and vegetarian sections.
The main thing you have to worry about as a vegan at an Indian restaurant is avoiding dairy because it is seriously everywhere.
What to Ask
- Do you cook with ghee (clarified butter) or with vegetable oil?
- Do any of your dishes contain milk or dairy? (Which ones don’t?)
What to Order & How to Order It
- Roti
- Chapati
- Papadum
- Veggie Samosas
- Pakora
- Dal Chaawal
- Vadas
- Dosas
- Biryani
- Chana Masala
Ask your server to make sure there is no dairy in any of your dishes and to not garnish anything with ghee or butter.
Even if you pick an item that seems vegan based on its definition, still make sure to let your server know that you’re vegan and can’t have dairy, just in case.
Vegan Indian Food Recipes
You’ll enjoy a lot more variety by making Indian food at home, because you control every ingredient that goes into a dish. There are plenty of traditionally non-vegan Indian foods that can easily be made vegan at home.
Most Indian food cookbooks and recipe blogs have a variety of easily-veganized recipes alongside non-vegan recipes. The easily-veganized recipes are usually vegetarian so all you need to do is replace the dairy with a vegan dairy substitute.
If you’re fine with flipping past the non-vegan recipes to get to the easily-veganized recipes, you won’t have a hard time finding loads of resources for cooking vegan Indian food at home.
Below are Indian food blogs and cookbooks that are exclusively vegan:
Blogs
Cookbooks
- Vegan Richa’s Indian Kitchen by Richa Hingle