Is Sourdough Bread Vegan? (Beginners Guide)

While sourdough bread is a simple 3 ingredients recipe, commercial sourdough can contain a lot more than that. And with all those added ingredients it can be really hard to determine if a sourdough bread is vegan. So I decided to write this short guide that will tell you everything you need to know in order to determine if a sourdough bread is vegan or not.

Homemade sourdough bread usually contains just 3 ingredients: water, flour, and salt, which are all vegan. Commercial sourdough bread can contain other ingredients like milk, eggs, butter, or cream which makes it non-vegan.

If you want to make sourdough bread at home you can easily make it vegan by simply following a traditional recipe, but if you want to buy it things can become a little more complicated than simply looking at the ingredients.

Some additives, despite having the exact same name, can come from plants or from animals. Then there are the bread tins, which might have been greased with non-vegan ingredients. And of course, there is the dilemma about the starter.

So let’s talk a little more in-depth about those things and see how you can easily avoid non-vegan sourdough bread.

Enriched Sourdough Bread Is Usually Not Vegan

As I said sourdough bread usually contains 3 to 4 ingredients, which are:

• Flour
• Water
• Salt
• Starter

The starter is a combination of flour and water that has been left to ferment over long periods of time. The starter is completely vegan (unless something else has been added to it, but more on that in just a moment), and since it’s made out of flour and water which are already on the ingredient list, some brands don’t bother adding it to the ingredient list, but some do.

Enriched sourdough, is a normal sourdough bread but with added ingredients like milk, butter, bream, eggs, honey, lard, etc. And as you can see, those ingredients are not vegan.

While there are a few ingredients that can be used to enrich sourdough, like margarine, or plant-based syrups, this is usually not the case. So overall I would suggest you stay away from enriched sourdough bread, But if you really want to mix things up make sure to read the label very carefully.

Ingredients That Can Be Vegan or Non-vegan

From my experience there are very few commercial sourdough bread brands that follow the traditional recipe, most of them add a few extra ingredients in order to make the bread last longer, or to differentiate themselves from the rest.

While most vegans know what ingredients to avoid there are a few ingredients that can be found in commercial sourdough bread which can easily make you believe the wrong thing about them.

The most common misleading ingredients found in sourdough bread are:

• Lecithin
• Monoglycerides and Diglycerides
• DATEM (Diacetyl Tartaric Ester of Monoglyceride)

Lecithin is the generic term used for a group of fatty substances that can be found in both plants and animals. Lecithin is used in sourdough bread to help it achieve greater loaf volumes and increase shelf life. While the most common source for lecithin is soy, which is vegan it can also come from animals and fish. 

Monoglycerides and Diglycerides are also frequently used in all kinds of bread due to their properties. And just like lecithin, they can come from animals as well as plants.

Diacetyl Tartaric Ester of Monoglyceride, or DATEM for short, is used in bread because it improves its texture and increases the volume. DATEM is the result of combining Monoglycerides and Diglycerides with tartaric acid, and since it contains an ingredient that can be either vegan or non-vegan, the same thing applies to DATEM.

In order to know for sure if all the ingredients in the bread are vegan or not, the only thing that you can usually do is to look at the package. While the regulations are not exactly clear, most manufacturers specify the nature of their ingredients. And if you get your bread from a local bakery, you can always ask them if they know, or if they can look up the origin of their ingredients.

Non-vegan Starters

Here is how starters are usually made: You start by mixing into a jar equal parts water and flour, then you leave it for a day, the next day you throw out some of the mix, then you add some nef flour and water and mix them, and then you repeat. This is the extremely simplified version, if you want to make sourdough I have a much more detailed recipe.

But the idea is that the flour and the water will ferment and produce natural yeast, which will be combined with some more flour and water, as well as some salt to make bread.

So the starter is 100% vegan. But just like with the bread itself, the starter can be enriched with a lot of things, ranging from milk to butter, to honey, and much more. This is usually done to enrich the taste of the bread or to speed up the fermentation process.

Some brands will list the ingredients of their starters, some won’t. There isn’t too much that you can do if the ingredients of the starter are not mentioned. And again, if you buy bread at a local bakery ask the staff working there, from my experience they are more than happy to answer questions about their products.

Greased Bread Tins

While sourdough bread doesn’t require a bread tin when making huge quantities of bread, tins are really useful in keeping things organized. And in order for the bread not to stick to the tin, or to remove it easier, the tins can be sprayed, or greased with a non-vegan product, like a butter spray, or animal fat.

So unless you are buying from a local bakery it’s hard to ask a big company if they grease their tins, but not impossible, most companies have a contact page, where you can find an email address or a phone number.

Does the Sourdough Starter Contain Bacteria, Is It Still Vegan?

The bacteria that are found in the starter are called probiotics and they are a good type of bacteria that can also be found naturally in our gut, where it does a lot of beneficial things for us.

I also want to make it clear that the bacteria we are talking about are found in the sourdough starter, not the bread, during the baking process the bacteria are destroyed by the intense heat.

But despite those bacteria, sourdough is still vegan. While everybody has their motives for choosing a vegan diet, most vegans don’t eat animals and animal products, to put it simply.

While the bacteria are alive, the same thing can be said about plants. The bacterias that live in the sourdough come from the flour itself, as it’s basically yeast. And overall those bacterias have more in common with mushrooms and other plants, than with animals.

So, yes, sourdough is vegan. The bacteria that live in it are more closely related to plants than to animals.

If you want to know more about bacteria that live in the sourdough starter, what they do there, why they are essential for sourdough, as well as the health benefits that they provide you can check out my article: Is Homemade Sourdough Bread Safe? (The Final Verdict)

Is Sourdough Bread Considered Plant-Based?

Sourdough bread can be eaten on a plant-based diet. But only if it’s made with whole grain, this includes the starter as well.

Sourdough can be made using any kind of flour, this applies to the starter as well as the bread itself. And the starter can be made with one or multiple types of flour, that are different from the flour used to make the bread itself.

Vegan-Friendly Enriched Sourdough Bread Alternatives

If traditional sourdough bread is not to your liking you can try enriched sourdough bread recipes and make it vegan-friendly by changing some ingredients with some vegan alternatives. Here are some alternatives for some of the most popular enrichments.

And I want to mention that I know that there are many vegan versions of some of the ingredients I will talk about, but some of them are not easily available to everybody and not all of them work for making bread, so I won’t talk about them.

Vegan-Friendly Butter Alternatives

One of the most common ways of enriching sourdough bread is adding butter.

Instead of butter, you can use any kind of vegetable oil. So instead of 4 tablespoons of melted butter, you can use 4 tablespoons of oil. Basically, you will use the exact same quantity that the recipes asked for, but instead of butter, you will be using oil. 

Some examples of oil that you can use instead of butter:

• Sunflower oil
• Coconut oil
• Olive oil
• Avocado oil
• Canola oil

Vegan-Friendly Milk Alternatives

Dairy milk can be replaced with any kind of plant-based milk, just keep in mind that plant-based milk doesn’t have the same consistency as dairy milk.

But the consistency problem can usually be solved by adding an extra teaspoon of oil.

Vegan-Friendly Egg Alternatives

Eggs are commonly used in enriched sourdough bread due to the extra texture that they give to the bread. But you can obtain very similar results by using flaxseeds and water.

Now, you can’t simply throw the flaxseeds and the water in the dough, this won’t do any good you first have to follow this short recipe:

1. Boil 1 oz of water
2. Add 1 teaspoon of flaxseeds to the water
3. Reduce the heat to low
4. Wait for 3 minutes
5. Strain the liquid in a bowl
6. Your vegan-friendly egg alternative is ready

When placed in water flax seeds will make the water have a gel-like structure similar to that of an egg.

If your mix is too thin you can leave it a few more minutes on the stove. If the mix is too thick add a little bit of water and give it a good stir.

Vegan-Friendly Sweeteners

One of the most common sweeteners used in sourdough bread is honey. The sugar found in honey will help bust the rising power of the bread. But luckily any kind of sweetener that contains sugar can do the exact same thing.

Some good vegan alternatives to honey are:

• Maple syrup
• Brown rice syrup
• Beet sugar
• Agave nectar
• Molasses

List of Vegan and Non-vegan Types of Bread

Before we end this article, here is a short table with some of the most popular types of bread, divided into two categories: Vegan and Non-Vegan.

But please keep in mind that just like in the case of sourdough, I’m referring to the traditional recipe, there are ways to make a non-vegan bread vegan, as well as the opposite, as we just discussed.

Final Thoughts

So in the end, I would say that sourdough bread can be vegan. If you do it yourself at home you can be 100 percent sure that every ingredient is vegan and that no animal product has been used in the making of the bread. But if you want to buy it, things become a little more complicated.

If you want to buy sourdough bread my suggestion is to go to a local bakery that makes its own bread right there, this way you can ask the employees, and they will be able to tell you every detail about how the bread was made.

If you buy it from the shelf of a supermarket it can be quite hard to be 100% sure that the bread is vegan, unless they provide all the information that you need.