Nov 22 - JHB North

No butter.
No eggs.
No problem!
The word ‘vegan’ isn’t usually synonymous
with decadence and indulgence – unless
you’re munching one of the creations
fresh out the oven from Megan Wessel’s
vegan bakery, Gypsy Kitchen.
What do you do if you can’t find the tasty treats you’re
hankering for? If you’re Megan, you’re start making
them yourself.
Megan is the first to admit that she never expected to find
herself running a bakery. After all, the kitchen is pretty far
from the swimming pool, where she had spent 12 years
teaching kids to swim – and, before she started baking her
vegan goodies, she didn’t even know how to cook rice.
The turning point came when she started experiencing
severe health issues, which continued for three years.
She eventually ended up having emergency surgery to
correct a sliding hiatus hernia, and was forced to rethink
her diet to aid her recovery. “It wasn’t easy,” she says. “My
family’s love language is food – we’re all about the big
celebrations over a laden table.” It was over one of those
tables that Megan first had an inkling that it might be
meat that was making her ill. Her father, a committed braai
master, had fired up the coals – and instead of loving the
feast, Megan found herself back at hospital to find out
why she had relapsed.
When tests revealed that she was perfectly healthy (at
least in theory), Megan decided to start a food diary,
recording everything she ate and noting how she felt
afterwards. It soon became clear that her body preferred
fruit and veg, and although she still ate chicken and fish
from time to time, she quit white meat too after a dodgy
restaurant experience.
Avoiding meat didn’t mean giving up sugar, though,
especially since the man she was dating at the time (now
her husband), Chef, was a trained French chef with a
decidedly sweet tooth. “After he asked me to bake him
cookies, I started baking with his daughter every Sunday,”
Megan recalls.
The results weren’t too impressive – “terrible” is how she
describes them – but with ongoing practice, they got
better and better. So good, in fact, that after her boyfriend
brought some cookies for the people attending his mixed
martial arts gym to sample, Megan received a number
of orders. Soon after, she found herself trying to fill those
orders in between swimming lessons, morning and
evening. “It’s family tradition that we all club together
to gift each other a Kenwood mixer, and although I had
never used it before, it swiftly became my most frequently
used piece of equipment,” she recalls.
It was Chef who suggested she start taking her baking
more seriously. “At the time, there really weren’t many
vegan options available for people who wanted a little
indulgence – and we thought, if we’re struggling to find
treats we like, there must be other people looking for
these products, too.”
Given the scarce resources, it wasn’t easy to start baking
on a larger scale. Everything had to be made from scratch,
because the ingredients that are part and parcel of baked
goods – simple buttercream, for example – weren’t readily
available. It took a lot of trial and error, but finally Megan
came up with products she felt proud of.
Although her new business was thriving, Megan hadn’t
yet given up on her swimming school – and then,
Chef told her that the manager of the café at his gym
was leaving, and that he thought she should take the
plunge, leave the pool and become a full-time baker. “I
was terrified,” she admits. “I knew nothing about running
a bakery – I didn’t even know how to cost my items.” It
didn’t help that the restaurant wasn’t equipped as a
bakery – there wasn’t even proper drainage, so Megan
had to use a bucket which had to be pushed outside
to be emptied, every day. Plus, it turned out that all the
vegan recipes she was able to source from overseas
needed a lot of tweaking to make them work in the South
African environment, where humidity and even oven
temperatures are different. “On one particularly horrible
occasion, I walked into the kitchen to find that the unicorn
cake someone had ordered for their daughter’s party had
completely melted due to the humidity – and she was
about to collect it in 10 minutes.”
Not that she allowed this to deter her: she saw the
challenges as an opportunity to push herself. She kept
persevering, until she was satisfied that she had mastered
some truly irresistible bakes. “It took us two years to
perfect our croissants and three years to get the macarons
right, but it was worth it.” Knowing that she was not alone
in her quest for vegan delights was all the motivation
she needed to keep pushing, Megan says. Perhaps more
than this, she was inspired by the knowledge that she was
helping people: “Veganism isn’t just about the diet. It’s a
whole lifestyle that’s geared to making you feel better,
24 Get It Magazine November 22