Nisha Vora

Nisha Vora
Occupation	Vegan/Plant-based cookbook author
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley Harvard Law School
Subject	Vegan/Plant-based cookbooks
Notable works	Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking (2024) The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes (2019)

Nisha Vora is an American Vegan/Plant-based cookbook author and blogger.

Early life and education

Vora's parents emigrated from Mumbai, India to New Jersey in 1982. Her father, who is a physician, moved the family to Barstow, California, when he heard that there was a need for doctors there, and Vora grew up in Barstow.

At the age of 14, Vora began to teach herself how to cook by watching chefs such as the Ina Garten and Alton Brown on the Food Network, spending time in the cookbook section of bookstores, and learning from her mother, who created Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Vora's family had given her three career paths to choose from (medicine, engineering, law), so she chose law. She continued to cook for her friends in college and law school, and received her degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and her JD from Harvard Law School in 2012.

Career

After law school, Vora worked in "a big law firm and a smaller nonprofit," but realized that she did not like the legal profession. She used cooking and eventually food blogging as a way to cope with the stress of legal work, and became involved in food photography and recipe development. Ultimately, she left her career as a lawyer in 2016 in order to focus fully on being a vegan food blogger, which was "inspired by documentaries about factory farming."

In 2017, Vora worked for a food startup while maintaining her social media presence. In 2018, she was contacted by Penguin-Random House with an offer to turn recipes from her fledgling vegan cooking blog, "Rainbow Plant Life," into a book (The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes, 2019). Vora does credit law school with the writing, research, and analytical skills needed for her current work saying that when she "was developing a chocolate chip recipe, I did a mountain of research on ingredient ratios in non-vegan chocolate chip cookies, the percentage of butter, the percentage of fat, the percentage of eggs, so that I could come up with a recipe that tastes just as delicious and is just as chewy and has crispy edges like a regular chocolate chip cookie. I bring this super analytical lens that I think comes from having that background as a law student and as a lawyer.”

In 2024, Gotham named her cooking channel, Rainbow Plant Life one of the "8 Vegetarian and Vegan Youtube Channels That Make Plant-Based Cooking Easy."

The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook

Forbes named her first cookbook, The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes (2019) as one of the "Best Vegan Cookbooks" of 2019, Food & Wine called it one of "The 18 Best Vegan Cookbooks for Every Type of Meal" in 2023, Parade listed it as one of the "Best Vegan Cookbooks to Add to Your Collection Right Now" in 2019, and Good Housekeeping named it as one of the "14 Best Healthy Cookbooks, According to Cooking and Nutrition Experts" in 2023. VegNews listed The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook as one of the "Top 100 Vegan Cookbooks of All Time" in 2024.

Big Vegan Flavor

Her second cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking (2024) was #3 on the The New York Times Best Seller list for the week of September 22, 2024. The Washington Post Food and Dining Editor Joe Yonan notes that: "What Vora does so beautifully in Big Vegan Flavor is break down plant-based cooking into its crucial elements, writing about how to achieve various textures." He also underscores Vora's thesis that "this is a distinct cuisine with its own principles and strategies." Kristin Montemarano, in Food & Wine, also gave Big Vegan Flavor a positive review stating that there "are no words to describe how excited I am for this cookbook! It's filled with all of Nisha Vora's incredible knowledge of vegan cooking, from the building blocks of your pantry to the essential flavor-building steps you should always be taking. It's partially a book for knowledge and partially a recipe book filled with truly flavorful dishes like her close-to-the-heart Dal Tadka to epic skillet lasagnas (yum!), all made vegan. But, as the book states, nothing, and I mean nothing ever lacks in flavor.”

Books

• Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking. Avery, 2024. ISBN 978-0593328934.
• The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook: Wholesome, Indulgent Plant-Based Recipes. Avery, 2019. ISBN 978-0525540953.

External links

• Official website
• RainbowPlantLife- Official YouTube Channel
• Biography from Penguin Random House