Cooking vegan shouldn't require a culinary degree.
Verdant Kitchen started in a one-bedroom apartment kitchen with a single hot plate and a lot of failed lentil loaves. Six years later, we're a small team of recipe developers, food scientists, and video editors testing every recipe at least three times before it reaches you.
Why we exist
When our founder, Maya Odera, went vegan in 2019, she found plenty of recipe blogs — and almost none she could trust. Recipes skipped steps, photos didn't match instructions, and "5-minute" meals somehow took 45. So she started filming herself cooking, mistakes included, and posting the raw footage next to the written recipe.
That video-first habit is still the core of how we work. If a recipe makes it onto Verdant Kitchen, someone on our team has cooked it on camera, in a normal home kitchen, with normal grocery-store ingredients — not a test kitchen with professional equipment most readers don't own.
Today Verdant Kitchen is read by more than 45,000 people a month, from brand-new vegans looking for a foolproof weeknight dinner to longtime plant-based cooks hunting for their next favorite sauce.
What guides every recipe we publish
Three rules that haven't changed since day one.
Tested, not theoretical
Every recipe is cooked on camera by a real person in a real kitchen before publishing — not generated, scraped, or estimated.
Honest about tradeoffs
If a recipe is finicky, expensive, or an acquired taste, we say so. Our reviews call out the products that underperform, not just the ones that impress.
Built with the community
Reader substitutions, ratings, and comments shape how we update recipes over time — this is a living cookbook, not a static archive.
Meet the team
A small crew of recipe developers, a food scientist, and one very opinionated video editor.
Founder & Head Recipe Developer. Plant-based for 7 years, formerly a line cook. Focuses on batch cooking and weeknight staples.
Baking & Desserts Lead. Food science background; obsessive about egg-replacement ratios and gluten structure in vegan baking.
Video & Product Testing. Runs our gear and packaged-food reviews — protein powders, cheeses, meat alternatives, and kitchen tools.