Coconut Oil Alternative

Our answer

Nigella uses "cold pressed" or "raw" coconut oil in some of her recipes as it is a useful dairy-free alternative to butter. It is solid at cool room temperature so can be used for pastry and cakes, but also has a high "smoke point" so is good for higher temperature frying.

The flavour of the coconut oil is not that pronounced in most of the finished dishes but if you prefer to use an alternative then you can use butter, or a vegetable margarine if you want to avoid dairy. For the Dark And Sumptuous Chocolate Cake Nigella mentions in the introduction that you can use vegetable oil in the cake batter and butter in the icing. For all substitutions the quantities are the same as the coconut oil.