Baking Soy-Free 101
/Hello! Welcome to Beyond Soy!
We are in the middle of several weeks of posts covering the basics of cooking, baking, eating, and buying soy-free food. Last week we gave some starter advice for cooking soy-free food in Cooking Soy-Free 101. This week we are talking about baking.
When we first started cooking soy-free food, Ashley and I had many struggles, false starts, and unintentional learning opportunities. We knew that we wanted to eat soy-free food, and we knew that meant that we had to cook a lot of it ourselves (at least initially).
We've learned a lot over the past few years and want to share that information with you! We know it can feel complex and complicated when first trying to bake soy-free meals. But the good news is that anyone can do it! With a little practice you can bake soy-free for yourself or others!

Image Via Pixabay
The five places to watch out for soy are: oils, butter, soy products, breads, and emulsifiers (chocolate, powders, non-stick spray, etc). The tips below are centered around these five areas.
Oils:
- Use canola oil or olive oil.
- Don't use vegetable oil--it almost always consists of soybean oil!
- Crisco or other shortenings contain soybean oil. It is possible to get soy-free shortening!
Butter:
- Use real butter!
- Margarine is often made from soybean oil.
Soy Products:
- This isn't usually a concern in baking as soy products are rarely used.
Breads:
- Avoid pre-baked goods. Almost all baked goods in a wrapper contain soy flour or soybean oil, including most brands of graham crackers. Annie's graham crackers are soy-free!
- Carefully check boxed cake and cookie mixes! Many of them contain soy.
- When in doubt, read ingredient labels! Soy isn't necessarily required to be called out as an allergen, so be sure to read the entire ingredient list.
Emulsifiers:
- Be careful with chocolate! Almost all chocolate has soy lecithin in it. Use Nestle Dark Chocolate Morsels for chocolate chips as they are soy-free.
- Most non-stick spray has soy lecithin in it. Use butter or canola oil instead!

image via pixabay
Using the rules above, baking soy-free food shouldn’t be challenging. It just takes a little more awareness of what is in each ingredient. Baking at home is already a step in the right direction because you avoid the soy present in almost all pre-baked goods.
For more Soy-Free 101 information see our Cooking Soy-Free 101 page and check back soon for our upcoming posts!