Eat vegan with Rachel Ama

Want to give plant-based dishes a go this month, while still eating fabulous feel-good food? Then check out Rachel Ama’s recipes that inject the Caribbean into her satisfyingly delicious dishes

I DON’T CARE whether it’s chickpeas or chia seeds: I want what Rachel Ama’s having. The 27-year-old Youtuber, who runs a vegan-cooking channel with 370,000 subscribers, arrives for our interview looking clear-skinned and glowing – despite it being early on a miserable morning. We’re meeting for coffee (with oat milk, of course) at By CHLOE, the plant-based restaurant at which Rachel recently offered a limitededition menu. Her BBQ jerk cauliflower was the big hit, she says; her friends kept texting her to complain that it had sold out.

This is the secret to Rachel’s success. Vegan food used to be something that meat-eaters rolled their eyes at: virtuous but not appetising. When she gave up animal products herself – appalled by a documentary she’d seen on chicken farming – she set out to do things differently. ‘When I looked in the space for vegans online, it was very much Buddha bowls, which to me are a little bit bland,’ she says. ‘I grew up in London where there was so much diverse food, and I didn’t see it in the vegan space. It all looked boring.’

Her videos, which she films at home at her mum’s (‘I’ve just got to make sure I put all the equipment away and the kitchen is how I left it. Those are the rules’), are a riot of colour, with influence from St Lucia, home of her paternal grandparents, and Sierra Leone, where her maternal grandfather came from. She’s not averse to Buddha bowls, but hers include Caribbean flavours; she does a great take on Kentucky fried vegan ‘chicken’, and from her book, Vegan Eats, I make a delicious African peanut stew with sweet potato and Scotch bonnet chillis. ‘It’s my favourite recipe,’ she says with a smile.

It’s not just the food that’s appealing; the way it’s presented is equally joyful. The book is peppered with music recommendations, and on Instagram you’ll see Rachel dancing in the kitchen. Music, in fact, was the industry she first set her sights on. She grew up with two entrepreneurial parents, and decided to study business management and look for work in the music world – but when there were no relevant jobs to be found, she saved up and went travelling instead. Exploring South America and the USA, she found herself fascinated by local foods, and came home with the urge to cook.

‘My mum was like, “Who do you think you are?”’ she recalls with a chuckle. It was her first foray into the kitchen. ‘I’d wanted to play sports, play football, and cooking wasn’t really an activity I got into,’ she says. ‘At uni it was literally, “Oh, I’ll make my pasta” – very basic.’

Having being diagnosed as lactose intolerant, she had given up dairy years before, but she was still teased by friends who couldn’t believe she’d gone from eating chicken every day to giving up animal products altogether. They kept asking what she was eating, and the truth was that it took her time to work it out herself. ‘I was so hungry the first few weeks,’ she says. ‘I cut out the meat and fish and I upped the veg a bit, but it just wasn’t enough. It took me going to bed hungry every night to realise that I needed more protein and carbs. Now I centre all meals around a legume or a grain; I train and I want to be full. I want my body to be happy.’

Back home and working for her mum, the Youtube channel became a new focus of her entrepreneurial spirit – not that she had a long-term plan. ‘It was more like, “It would be great if this turned into something,”’ she says. ‘Any business advice I’ve had from family has been, “Don’t be too set on an endgoal, just go for the opportunity and see where it takes you.”’ It took her to a book deal, and thousands of fans of all ages. ‘A lot of the feedback is “I’m not vegan but I love your recipes”,’ she says. ‘That makes me happy, because I wanted it to be a place where you didn’t feel like you have to be vegan to hang out.’

This Veganuary, she recommends a few easy changes for those who want to give it a try: swap dairy for oat milk, or pick a day or two of the week for plant-based dinners. ‘Then you’ll just incorporate them slowly and you’ll find what you like – and once you’ve got the recipes you like, you want to make them more,’ says Rachel, who wants to get her non-vegan friends on to her channel. ‘I want to make it welcoming and exciting,’ she says. Everyone’s invited to the table.