> Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?
I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).
So my wife and I are vegetarian and I love certain vegan cheese, the naturally cultured ones where you essentially have a plant product that is cultured with cheese bacteria.
My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
> I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
I tend to agree with this. I'm not a vegetarian, but if I were, I'd wouldn't eat imitation animal products anymore than I'd drink non-alcoholic beer.
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
> stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
Agreed. I explained benevolent bacon to someone as “you’re not going to think ‘wow it’s like I just ate bacon’ but you might think ‘ok I don’t need to eat bacon when I’ve had that’.” For me, anyway, certain key flavors and textures are there, but it’s still a new experience itself.
It's because people are working with existing recipes they know and dishes they grew up on and have fond memories of. Thus having a good vegan version of those recipes often relies on having a reasonable ingredient substitution.
>Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
>I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
Wanted to make pizza with my two year old daughter a couple of weeks ago. Picked up some mozzarella at the store and when I went to use it noticed the well hidden plant logo and "plant based" text that was almost the same color as the packaging. Figured I'd give it a shot. It was inedible, completely ruined the pizza. My daughter took a bite and said "no, dad" I agreed and we threw it away and got a happy meal.
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
Finding vegan cheeses that work well on pizza is a monumentally difficult task. Miyoko is one of few I've liked for pizza use. I generally don't eat much store bought vegan cheese as I don't love the Kraft singles-type ones my vegan wife has nostalgia for, and buying the nice vegan ones is usually pretty expensive.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
I'm curious, which brand was it? Can you find a picture of the packaging? I'm morbidly curious to see what this alleged train wreck looks like. I've honestly never noticed a brand that I thought was hard to identify. They usually prominently feature language like "alternative" or "-style shreds" or whatever.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
i am not liking the way many of this is packaged. any other product and hackernews would be angry for the "deceptive packaging", but because the hackernews like this product, they are give it a freepass.
I tried a sample of Vegan Cheese once and it immediately brought to mind Arthur Dent trying to get Tea out of the Nutrimatic. It was something almost but not quite completely unlike cheese. It made me wonder if the person who invented it had ever tasted cheese before or had just read about it in a book or something.
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
Vegan cheese is junk food. When you bake it into mac & cheese or melt it on a hamburger it does a great job. When you want to actually enjoy some cheese it's not even close to equivalent.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
How do you define junk food? Most animal-based products are more “junky” than vegan alternatives. No vegan meat substitute will have cholesterol, for instance.
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
I am not vegan, but lactose intolerant. Vegan cheese has changed my life. Mind you that I was not lactose intolerant till about 18yrs. So I have certainly tried most versions of dairy cheese. I love them both. Sometimes Vegan cheese' flavor and texture is suited and in other cases I would have preferred regular cheese. The fail case happens for me when I try to compare these new vegan X with original X at every single detail instead of judging each of them on their own merit.
Which brands have you tried? There's a wild diversity, and I suspect even with dairy cheeses you could try many kinds and think it's "missing" something (compared to another type of cheese, or even the same cheese from a different producer)
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
>For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
> The answer is no, it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
(partner is also vegan) - Miyoko Garlic Herb is the only one I've ever had that is "good" in my opinion.
It's definitely not cheese, but as a picnic cheese/crackers situation I actually might like it more than a cheese version.
Not a fan of the substitutes either. Vegan meat is okay-ish, but it's obviously not meat and it doesn't have animal fats so it's never gonna be meat really. Also your just fooling your sense of taste, it will adjust eventually, and it seems the more fake meat you eat, the less tasty it becomes.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
Yeah I don't think any substitute foods will fare well when eaten on their own but they shine when they're part of a larger dish. And if you're only eating real cheese when its by itself like on a charcuterie board that's already a huge improvement!
I find the meltiness is really what kills it for me, in most cases. If you're wanting something to add to a charcuterie board or to put out with your appetizers, there are a lot of great cashew-based cheeses that do a pretty good job at mimicking softer cheeses. They're a bit pricey, but probably close to the price you'd spend on a quality dairy cheese.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
> If you're wanting something to add to a charcuterie board or to put out with your appetizers, there are a lot of great cashew-based cheeses that do a pretty good job at mimicking softer cheeses.
I have eaten some that will easily surpass anything you will find in an American convenience store. Sure they aren’t for aficionados but that pass for accompaniment on wraps etc.
Great, but for lots of people that are lactose intolerant or allergic, it can be good enough. Some are better than others. I am not fond of Daiya, and prefer Violife. You also want to use less of it, and choose or modify recipes accordingly.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
This does not sound like my experience at all. I'm also vegetarian and lean towards being vegan when it's easy enough. And I can't remember the last time I actually bought dairy cheese at the market that wasn't on a prepared item. I do have a bunch of vegan cheeses in my fridge though. In fact I have frequently remarked recently how amazing all the new cheeses are that I've tried.
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
Non-vegan vegetarian here and I agree. The flip side of it is, the dairy cheeses next to the vegan cheeses don't pass my taste test either.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
I recommend buying plain yoghurt and adding to it whatever you actually like. It's less waste usually, cheaper and exactly what you actually want to eat.
Have either of you tried Pleese? I believe they're mostly selling to pizzerias now [1] and not supermarkets. They aren't able to scale up mass-production quickly because they use a different approach/ingredients - "proprietary blend of bean and potato proteins" [2].
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
We suspected my 2 y/o son had a dairy allergy, so we started buying pizzas with vegan cheese to see if that relieved any of his symptoms. I thought the flavor was horrid, but my son happily devoured the pizza.
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
Indeed good cheese is hard to find as much American cheese has a plasticky texture and bland taste. I've only had success with small dairy farms and stuff imported from Europe. Mount Tam is good.
Have you tried Spero sunflower cream cheese? I would say it is less like a cream cheese exactly and more like a new food on its own (like hummus or guacamole, but neutral and pair-able in taste like cheese or butter). The Goat on some toast with a dollop of jam will kill any cheese pastry envy. It is very good, even special. Vegan food is best when it draws inspiration without exact imitation and Spero really created something unique.
I would say one who says vegan cheese might pass for an alternative to regular cheese has never tasted something that passes as actual cheese [in Switzerland/France].
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
On the contrary to most of these opinions, there's one vegan shredded cheese out there that makes delicious nachos. I can't recall the brand but it takes just like the gooey nacho cheese of my youth. Probably low-end nacho cheese didn't have any dairy to begin with :)
Nacho cheese is dairy. It's processed cheese so it's made with bits and pieces of real cheese mixed together, and with emulsifiers, colourings and flavourings to cover the fact that you're eating melted cheese scraps.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
I'm tired of this laziness. I don't care about vegan cheese - I am vegan because it's better for me, the planet, and animals. Boohoo if I can't find some cheese that tastes exactly like cultured milk from a suffering animal.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
Be careful thinking just going vegan is better for the planet.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
I’m also all in on the fake veggie meats but have not had a good cheese experience even in vegan restaurants. It’s always some strange bean sludge/mat.
I think what they're saying is that, unlike real cheese, there's always something wrong with the taste of dairy-free cheese. FWIW my experience has been the same.
I think saying it's "not even close to ready" is way over the top. I've been vegan for two years and was a cheese lover prior to that, and I'm happy with the selection there is for doing things like mac and cheese, pizza, a slice on sandwiches etc.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
There's certainly a trope of "...but I can't give up cheese" and as someone who went from vegetarian to vegan: Yeah, cheese is hard to replicate. But also: your body and tastes adapt.
After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.
There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].
We have blood sausages, why wouldn't we drink some animals milk. Humans have been also eating entrails and brains for a long time, so milk is just another ingredient in the omnivorous diet of humans.
You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.
Yeah, I've found moving to new foods to be relatively painless if done incrementally. Took just two weeks to convert my toddler son from cow's milk to soy milk (Silk brand, for the curious).
First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow.
Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.
You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.
A note for anyone coming across this: soy milk is nutritionally comparable to cow's milk, but other milk alternative are not. Children who receive much of their nutrition from milk should not transition directly to almond or oat milk without considering other parts of their diet as well.
Side-stepping how humans don't need milk after nursing, do you have any concerns with phytoestrogens? The closest thing to a consensus I've found with soy is small to medium amounts are probably fine, but there have been cases of funny things happening with large amounts.
This is a great point. My evidence is anecdotal but I became a vegetarian about 5 years ago. I used to hate all of the meat substitutes as the tasted "off". Now, after a few years of not eating meat, I could not tell you what chicken or meat would taste like and I have grown fond of some of the alternatives.
I don't understand why you need to imitate something that isn't vegan or vegetarian, when you want to eat vegan or vegetarian. There is a metric shitton of vegan and vegetarian dishes from the entire world's cuisines that you could be eating right now insteaed of a substitute for something you've decided never to eat again. Why pretend-eat what you don't want to eat in the first place?
That's just mad. Go eat Indian (meaning food from a dozen different places in and around India, including Bengali, Bangladeshi, etc). Eat a mediterrannean diet. Eat a North African diet. But why do you have to eat something vegan and call it cheese? That just doesn't make sense.
Here is another: you love cheese and are allergic to casein.
Not me, but the gal I am dating is allergic to dairy, and so we had some fun finding vegan cheeses that did not have casein. It was nice to make a dish that typically has cheese, that we both could enjoy.
But the spirit of what your doing is flawed. Your essentially saying that the thing was so good you'd like to have it again therefore reminding people that an exploration of animals is good in the sense for human consumption. Regardless if whether or not it comes from animals.
I have. Rather, the vegan I know didn't like the taste of meat.
But of course what I said had nothing to do with being vegan because you don't like the taste of cheese. What I said was, if you like the taste of meat and cheese so much so that you can't do without a substitute of it, then why are you vegan? If you are vegan, for good ethical or environmental reasons, then why do you need to eat pretend-meat and pretend-dairy? Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.
"I eat it because I like the taste of it" is exactly the moralising accusation levelled at non-vegans. If I have to go without meat and dairy to satisfy your morals then you have to go without pretend-meat and dairy to satisfy mine. You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.
And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.
Easy! People have lots of different reasons why they may choose not to eat meat or dairy. "Not liking the taste" is one possible reason. If that particular one isn't your reason, then you may still miss the taste/texture of certain foods, so having a substitute helps.
Who said anything about liking or disliking the taste of meat? If you're vegan, you don't want to eat meat, for whatever reason. What sense does it make to then pretend to eat meat anyway?
If you like meat so much you just have to have it, then what sense does it make to be vegan? Be flexitarian. Eat meat once a year, every Easter Sunday. Eat vegentarian. I don't know! But at least accept the fact that you can't stand being vegan because you really want to eat meat and dairy.
For me, anyone who eats pretend-meat or pretend-dairy is a pretend-vegan. If you're going to go off meat to save the planet, or because you think meat is murder, then stick to your own morality and go without anything that is in any way "like" meat. Otherwise, you're just advertising the need to eat meat and justifying everyone else to keep eating it and ignore your pleas for the environment and the baby calves.
If you tell me "I'm vegan, but I have to eat something like cheese", the easiest thing for me to reply is "I'm not vegan and I have to eat cheese". It just makes a joke of the whole idea of being vegan.
Just before the pandemic, I was thinking about how cheese was made from milk and how soy milk could (with the right extras) be a pretty decent milk substitute, and wondered if you could make a cheese alternative by applying the milk-to-cheese process to soy milk.
Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”.
The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard cheeses, and works in sandwiches. I’ve not even considered trying it on pizza though.
Rügenwalder Mühle makes vegetarian/vegan cheeses in Germany that are quite good when eaten cold, but probably don't melt well.
I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.
I think that's because it's got the wrong melting profile. Cashew cheese with either gelatin (if you're okay with that) or tapioca starch compares a lot better. And once it sets you can smoke it too!
I really like Miyokos “artisan vegan cheese, smoked English farmhouse.” It comes as a little round. Ingredients list is all recognizable names, too. Does not even attempt to melt though. It’ll kind of crisp up.
Forget about vegan cheeses on pizza/pasta. They taste crap.
What tastes really good is ground nuts. I sprinkle a mixture of ground pine nuts, cashew nuts, and tiny bit of pecan, (-/+ possibly some macademia nuts) and it tastes great. When ground properly in the right proportions, this mixture also has that nice fluffy, "cheesy" feel to it (i.e. it's not rough to the touch, it's soft and spreadable).
Different experience from actual cheese, but very tasty. Whereas whenever I've tried vegan cheese on pizza/pasta, they always leave an ugly aftertaste, have a disgusting texture and stick to my teeth and throat, and leave me bloated and feeling like crap afterwards.
This is what I'm more interested in: Don't try to replace animal foods directly, create great plant based foods. I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, but I am interested in reducing my animal consumption.
There are some cashew-based queso dips that are pretty darn tasty. Although, it's a bit easier for vegan to compete in that context since "real" queso dips are the whey stuff not cheese, per se.
Edit: to be clear, I'm commenting as a tangent to the ground nut suggestion. I'm not suggesting anyone put queso on pizza, unless that sounds good to you :)
I couldn't agree more. Cheeseless pizza is also a lot more fresh in my opinion. It's more like a flat focaccia with more toppings, in my case hiding under a mountain of arugula.
Actually, sorry, I should have said 'grated' instead of 'ground'.
When I do it, I actually use a rotary cheesegrater in the finest setting (i.e. something like this: www.thebakerskitchen.net/images/products/detail/811642026798.jpg). This makes the nuts come out soft and flakey.
But, yes, presumably a food processor should be ok too.
I have dairy allergy and all I can say is that I am so happy that these products are getting better and better.
Where I live (Europe) there are a lot of different ones available and quite a few are on the level of a cheap normal cheese.
Same. For me, dairy increase respiratory mucus production which makes me feel a little congested and increases the frequency amd severity of upper respiratory tract infections.
It also hurts my digestive system.
Both are subtle initially and ramp up with continued dairy consumption, so I can tolerate small infrequent amounts.
I suspect many more people have similar issues but don't realise.
Yeah I have exactly this. I tolerate small amounts but I avoid it on a daily basis. And I do love cheese but ain’t worth it. Lactose-free (aka adding lactase) helps sligthly but it seems it’s not the only thing causing trouble to me. All in all, we’re lucky we have alternatives.
There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle, resulting in the development of more and more advanced food processing technologies designed to synthesize the experience of foods being excluded from the diet.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
> There's something unexpected about this aspect of veganism, which is often embraced by those wanting to lead a healthier lifestyle ...
I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
I totally get ethical vegetarianism, and appreciate that much animal abuse can occur within the dairy industry, but I don't think that's inherent. Of course, believing that and shopping ethically requires a great deal more selectivity and research (and willingness to pay more for food whose provenance can be trusted).
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
That's why I said "often embraced", not "always embraced". :)
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
There is a wing of the ethical-vegan community who disapprove of meat substitutes, arguing that we will never truly do justice to our animal brothers and sisters until we have lost the very appetite for their flesh. So, it is not just those who eat vegan out of health concerns, who are concerned about meat substitutes.
Cheese is a 'processed' food. It's a long article, so I'm not surprised that nearly no-one in the comments has read it, but it goes into a lot of detail about the many small home-made cheese shops that are springing up with processes that more or less match that of the artisanal cheese making process.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
This is something I've noticed as well. Sometimes ingredient lists are a mile long. Less so here in Europe than what I've seen in America, but nevertheless it is shockingly less natural. I have always though that it makes more sense to just create vegan foods from what you have rather than recreating the things you are choosing not to eat.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
To some extent, it's an attempt to partake in the wider food culture while still following stricter ethical guidelines than those food cultures developed in.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
I'm vegan but I do agree. However, myself and other vegans I know do only use these alternatives on occasion. They're definitely not a part of our daily diet. I probably have vegan cheese once a month at most.
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
The ingredient list of an apple is also miles long if you are forced to write it out, you just aren't.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
Though I have no evidence to back it up, I get the impression that the popular justification for new adherents to veganism has shifted from ethical to health. Its original definition certainly points to the ethical concern:
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
As with anything, all people have different priorities. Some people prioritize taste in their food. Some health. Some ethics. Though usually it’s some combination of many different priorities. Indeed there are different types of Vegans as well, who don’t like to eat processed foods.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
I don't think "natural" is not a very good metric or goal to begin with.
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
I'd love for vegetable products to be processed skillfully enough that I wouldn't miss animal products. It's not the amount of processing that bothers me, it's the types of processing (and the types of additives.) Processed foods are on average terrible, but any particular heavily processed food might be wonderful for you.
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
Note that the The China Study book a few years ago (and its accompanying cookbooks) brought some people to adopt a solely plant-based diet, but without necessarily referring to themselves as "vegans". Of course, people following such movements may still be a minority of all plant-based-diet eaters, but they are out there if you search beyond fora calling themselves specifically vegan fora.
It's basically abusing the single metric. You can put "Vegan" on your label if you follow very specific rules and anything outside of those rules is far game. The folks that consume these products have mostly that label and marketing to go by.
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
A related question I always had is why many vegan people are pushing so hard for a substitute product just to simulate the flavor of flesh —- many Asian food like Tofu are vegan and natural. Why not embracing and inventing more types of naturally plant based recipes rather than pushing for fake meat?
The justification is that they are temporary/bridging foods while transitioning to a whole foods diet.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
Yea I don't really get the whole 'health food tech' industry. When I want to feel good or lose weight: Chicken breast, vegetables, water, nuts, rice. It's the same old story, people want to be healthy and diet without actually doing any of that or give up the idea that every meal is supposed to be a treat.
I had some bad experiences early on with vegan cheese substitutes, so I wrote them off years ago.
Recently I was eating my "standard" sandwich order from a local restaurant. It actually tasted so much better than normal that I asked if they had changed anything, only to find out that they had used their vegan cheese substitute by mistake.
I'll be giving these cheese substitutes another shot in the future!
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I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan - I’ve tried every vegan cheese on the shelf. The answer is no because it’s not even close to ready. It might pass an initial taste test where you say, that’s not so bad, but then you pick up on all the things it’s missing.
Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.
Maybe someday someone will crack it but what’s on the shelf today isn’t close. I’m not saying it’s all terrible but you aren’t going to convince many non vegans to eat it (like may be the case with the current beyond/impossible burger tech).
My experience with this stuff is similar to a lot of things in vegetarian diet, which is that the problems come about when you start trying to create imitations of animal products.
I do not want to suggest that people "just don't like vegan cheese because they're expecting animal milk cheese" but I do suspect that if people would stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses, they would feel really differently on average.
I also don't want to suggest substitutes don't work to a certain extent in certain cases. Impossible burgers, for example, have really pushed a lot of limits in that regard. But I do think that a lot of times trying to imitate just fails miserably.
I tend think of naturally cultured cashew cheese as pretty good. I just think of it as a cultured nut butter, which it is. I still love animal milk cheese, but I wouldn't just expect to substitute cashew butter for chevre, for example, nor would I expect to substitute cashew cheese for either one.
Maybe the article is poorly framed in that regard. I guess I just see it as a fool's errand to try to approach vegan cheeses as imitations. Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
Naming the product "vegan cheese" isn't doing it any favors in this regard.
A Chinese instructor told me once that tofu was the Chinese equivalent of Western cheese. ("And in as many varieties!") Nutritionally that seems basically correct. But you're not going to sell much tofu as a cheese substitute, or cheese as a tofu substitute.
I'm happy to eat vegetarian food. It stands on its own as delicious. One of the best "burgers" I've ever had was made with black beans and wasn't trying to imitate meat. (It was at The Vortex in Atlanta years ago.)
Imitation products that I've tried have always just left me wanting the real thing. Soy can be delicious prepared as soy and not trying to make it pretend to be meat. Tofurky. Yuck.
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
Exactly. Maybe the main problem is that it's hard to market 'Soylent Yellow'.
If I were to become a vegetarian, I think I'd just buy a bunch of Indian cookbooks and stay away from IncrediblyMeatyPlantBasedBurger(tm).
It can but if the objective is to reduce the world's, and specifically North America's appetite for animal products. You need to either aim to replace the current products or await a culture shift away from what is easy and cheap today.
I don't really think its a fool's errand for consumers to approach food as an imitation when its literally developed and marketed as an imitation/replacement.
Eventually the imitations and/or authentic lab grown food might get it right. Until then people will rightfully complain about them when they are disappointed.
Personally If I wanted to eat less animal products I'd just eat more fruit/vegetables/grains/rice prepared in traditional ways. They are delicious and likely to remain better than anything artificial at least for several more decades.
The producers of this stuff don't need to market to informed consumers like yourself. They need to go after the people who, while looking at items on a super market shelf, have no idea what to do with "cultured nut butter" but might have an idea about what "cashew cheese" is.
There's a lot of cultures with strong vegan food traditions, or at least, there's plenty of dishes that are naturally vegan. Vegan cheese doesn't fall into those traditions, it's a processed food product meant to provide a substitute for cheese without using animal products. That's really the only standard by which it can be judged, how well it succeeds at what it's trying to do.
Personally I would love a list of animal product ingredients and their suitable vegan replacements when trying to cook after some recipe.
I figure once everyone gets fooled once like I have it will stop selling.
Making homemade cashew cheese has pretty great results for vegan pizza. It's not the same as dairy, obviously, but it's a good main topping for when we share a pizza.
I'm not even sure why one of these companies would try to make the nature of the product well-hidden. Their goal isn't to trick people who eat dairy, it's to sell a product to people who are looking to avoid dairy. Why would a company actively hide from their target market?
If it had been something I bought from the store I might have thought it just had a short shelf life, but this was a sample from the vendor at a trade show. I tried it on the spot. Presumably it was as good as it was going to get. Also, that vendor was a complete jerk and set up their booth as far away from the water fountains as possible, so I was forced to hold that horrendous not-cheese taste in my mouth for several minutes while I rushed across the floor.
It also has approximately zero nutritional value, although the nut-based cheeses I guess have some fat and protein.
It's not really meant for regular people to enjoy. It's meant for vegans, people with dairy allergies, and other people can't or won't eat cheese to have the ability to enjoy the memory and suggestion of cheese.
I personally am very very deeply grateful for the existence and excellence of Daiya in providing me with a melty cheese-like food product that reminds me enough of real cheese that I can have fun eating it. But I'm not about to suggest that vegan cheese is and equivalent for real cheese made of milk from a cow, goat, sheep, etc. It's a substitute.
It's like Impossible meat. Yes, it makes a good burger, but you aren't going to get an Impossible Steak any time soon, and no it doesn't really taste like beef. It's still just chunks of soy protein (and it sits in your stomach the way you'd expect chunks of soy protein to sit).
As for nutritional value, there are certainly good fats and carbs in those products. Absent some protein, sure, but to say they have no nutritional value is disingenuous.
For example, a (dairy) farmer's cheese is going to be completely different from a blue cheese, which is completely different from a sharp cheddar. Each of those is "missing" something compared to the others. Quality vegan cheeses often try to mimic characteristics of different kinds of dairy cheeses, and often come very close. For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions; for example, if you tried 5 kinds of Blue Cheese, you'd likely find differences between them, and might not even be able to identify which one was vegan.
More than I could possibly recall. Violife, chao, follow your heart, miyokos, daiya, parmellas, go veggie, kite hill, Trader Joe’s brand
> For some kinds of cheese, people actually find them indistinguishable from the classic dairy versions
Not a chance that I believe this. Maybe as a minor ingredient in a larger meal but certainly not as a main ingredient or on its own.
Maybe for some people, in the same way that smokers drink Tim Hortons because they can't taste the difference. But plenty of us can tell the difference and for us, vegan cheeses taste horrendous.
I tried these and agree. My wife is vegetarian and I started to rarely eat meat but cheeses are still a staple in our house. However, vegetarian burgers are ready for prime time. They are my new thing, if you didn't tell I'm eating vegetarian burgers I would swear I'm eating meat.
Agreed. I eat meat but love veggie burgers.
I wish instead of pushing all these fake meat/dairy, we'd get a real vegetarian/vegan cuisine, like Indian/Oriental cooking, complex meals with lots of natural ingredients and spices, and have that become prevalent, as fast food, at the gas station and so on.
But once you start trying to melt vegan cheese...things get a little wonky. The consistency is just still not there, and yes, sometimes the aftertaste is pretty bad. I've found some that are bearable, but for the most part....I've just embraced cuisines that don't rely on cheese. Maybe some day we'll crack that (hazel?)nut, but we're still not there.
Agreed! They are different but equally delicious.
Orders of magnitude worse than Beyond Beef* / Impossible* (as compared to actual meat).
*just to be clear, I actually love both Beyond & Impossible's products. Extremely close to real meat IMO.
Most of the grocery store available ones are more appropriate for ingredient substitution. Cultured products like Rind or Reine that are more appropriate for eating on their own are less available.
In general, they are not cheese and it's not best to approach them as cheese as you would use dairy cheese.
You will get best results picking the cheese to meet your need, rather than simply trying to do anything and everything with the first thing you pick up. But even if you can't be bothered these days, it's mostly alright. I'm not even that worried about trying to melt a new vegan cheese these days. I don't have much faith it'll be particularly great, but I'm not worried about ruining anything either.
I don't foresee people running out to grab some vegan cheese to put on their real meat, but even with a truly perfect vegan cheese I think you'd have trouble getting major market penetration in that demographic.
What are they trying to imitate, shitty deli slices?
I really want vegan cheese, but I want Parmiggiano-Regano, Brie, Smoked Gouda, Burrata, Pepper Jack, and Manchego, not deli slices. I don't even eat real dairy deli slices.
Same thing for vegan yogurt. Every goddamn vegan yogurt brand makes the same 4 boring flavors: vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. The EXACT 4 FLAVORS I HATE. That's why I don't eat vegan yogurt. Why is there no pineapple upside-down cake, white chocolate raspberry, red date, and matcha? START with interesting flavors and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
That's how I eat cow's-milk yogurt: I get the plain stuff and add whatever jam/jelly I want to it. That doesn't have exotic flavors like matcha, and it's less convenient than a single-serve package, but it also means that I get to sweeten it to my taste.
I've been thinking of trying some vegan yogurt (I'm a non-vegetarian who is drastically reducing my animal products and eats vegan more often than not). The plant-based milks have been getting pretty good and I had high hopes that they'd make a decent yogurt.
I eat regular cheese and have tried several vegan brands, this seems pretty close to me. But I'm no cheese connoisseur.
[1] https://www.pleesefoods.com/availabilty
[2] https://www.pleesefoods.com/products
Perhaps the best short-term solution is to stop trying to convince people these products are direct replacements. Maybe school lunches for kids that don’t know any better? I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time these companies develop vegan food on par with their meat counterparts, but we need to stop acting like they’ve unlocked the secret formula.
https://sperofoods.co/
A lot of cheese you can get on this world has IMHO nothing to do with cheese in terms of taste, texture and the knowledge required to create an actual good cheese.
Another reason for all the additivies is to make nacho cheese melt and run like a thin sauce, in a way that cheese doesn't. But with normal cheese you get other desirable organoleptic qualities that can't be reproduce with additives.
For an example of the organoleptic qualities I'm talking about, watch this video:
https://youtu.be/4CVzqJWkodA?t=834
Look at how elastic the texture of that alpine style cheese is. Slices a few millimitres thick can be rolled into a cigar without breaking. That kind of texture cannot be reproduced artificially. And it can't be reproduced by "vegan" cheesemaking either. You need milk proteins for that and you need milk to be coagulated by rennet enzymes and the enzymes released by starter culture and ripening culture lactic acid bacteria while the cheese ages.
I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.
I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.
"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...
Would love to be proven wrong!
But cheese? Half the Miyoko's products taste like a finely ground nut paste mixed with mold and spoiled milk.
I'll say it then - it's all terrible. There's so many great vegan foods out there, fake cheese is not one of them.
These are both true of dairy cheeses too.
vegan cheese just doesnt have the same fat and sugar properties that normal cheese does.
Is it a perfect stand in? No. Does it serve the purpose? Absolutely
After a few weeks off of dairy our memories of those old textures and mouth feel start to fade and are replaced. Humans don't like changes in patterns, but at the same time are relatively quick to adapt to new ones.
There's real addiction at play with dairy as well [1]. Those young calfs get the dopamine hit to attract them to their mom's milk. For humans, it fuels our addition to dairy, whose importance as a food group was manufactured because it created another revenue stream after post-war food industrialization [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpellmanrowland/2017/06/2...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8447883/milk-health-benefit
You point out the for-profit incentives of dairy industry, but surely you don't think that it is much different for non-dairy/vegan products. Of course they are also pushing for same kind of acceptance at societal level, which means $$$.
The fact that demand for dairy was "manufactured" is somewhat orthogonal to whether or not it is for-profit.
Vegan cheeses aren't subsidized at 73 cents on the dollar, dairy is.
First day, it was 90% / 10% dairy/cow. Second day, it was (eyeballing) 85% / 15% dairy/cow.
You get the idea... Didn't even notice the transition.
That's just mad. Go eat Indian (meaning food from a dozen different places in and around India, including Bengali, Bangladeshi, etc). Eat a mediterrannean diet. Eat a North African diet. But why do you have to eat something vegan and call it cheese? That just doesn't make sense.
In my experience people tend to become vegan:
1. for the animals; and/or 2. for the planet; and/or 3. for health.
I have never heard another vegan say they became vegan because they didn't like the taste of cheese.
Not me, but the gal I am dating is allergic to dairy, and so we had some fun finding vegan cheeses that did not have casein. It was nice to make a dish that typically has cheese, that we both could enjoy.
The only way to end all this suffering is a good nuclear armageddon.
But of course what I said had nothing to do with being vegan because you don't like the taste of cheese. What I said was, if you like the taste of meat and cheese so much so that you can't do without a substitute of it, then why are you vegan? If you are vegan, for good ethical or environmental reasons, then why do you need to eat pretend-meat and pretend-dairy? Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.
"I eat it because I like the taste of it" is exactly the moralising accusation levelled at non-vegans. If I have to go without meat and dairy to satisfy your morals then you have to go without pretend-meat and dairy to satisfy mine. You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.
And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.
If you like meat so much you just have to have it, then what sense does it make to be vegan? Be flexitarian. Eat meat once a year, every Easter Sunday. Eat vegentarian. I don't know! But at least accept the fact that you can't stand being vegan because you really want to eat meat and dairy.
For me, anyone who eats pretend-meat or pretend-dairy is a pretend-vegan. If you're going to go off meat to save the planet, or because you think meat is murder, then stick to your own morality and go without anything that is in any way "like" meat. Otherwise, you're just advertising the need to eat meat and justifying everyone else to keep eating it and ignore your pleas for the environment and the baby calves.
If you tell me "I'm vegan, but I have to eat something like cheese", the easiest thing for me to reply is "I'm not vegan and I have to eat cheese". It just makes a joke of the whole idea of being vegan.
I've had a slice of their vegan pizza and it's quite awesome.
Dead Comment
Then I realised this already exists and is called “tofu”.
The smoked tofu I find around Berlin is pretty good even cold, tastes similar to some smoked hard cheeses, and works in sandwiches. I’ve not even considered trying it on pizza though.
I generally prefer cheese cold or at room temperature anyways, and I wish I could get Rügenwalder Mühle in the US, but it seems like they don't export.
https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte
The closest brand in the U.K. (and, I think, the USA) is Quorn, which I’ve missed since moving here.
Forget about vegan cheeses on pizza/pasta. They taste crap.
What tastes really good is ground nuts. I sprinkle a mixture of ground pine nuts, cashew nuts, and tiny bit of pecan, (-/+ possibly some macademia nuts) and it tastes great. When ground properly in the right proportions, this mixture also has that nice fluffy, "cheesy" feel to it (i.e. it's not rough to the touch, it's soft and spreadable).
Different experience from actual cheese, but very tasty. Whereas whenever I've tried vegan cheese on pizza/pasta, they always leave an ugly aftertaste, have a disgusting texture and stick to my teeth and throat, and leave me bloated and feeling like crap afterwards.
Edit: to be clear, I'm commenting as a tangent to the ground nut suggestion. I'm not suggesting anyone put queso on pizza, unless that sounds good to you :)
When I do it, I actually use a rotary cheesegrater in the finest setting (i.e. something like this: www.thebakerskitchen.net/images/products/detail/811642026798.jpg). This makes the nuts come out soft and flakey.
But, yes, presumably a food processor should be ok too.
But in the end: at least it’s something.
It also hurts my digestive system.
Both are subtle initially and ramp up with continued dairy consumption, so I can tolerate small infrequent amounts.
I suspect many more people have similar issues but don't realise.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.
I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
Doing a quick search seems to support that, but perhaps the trends / reasons are changing as veganism in general becomes more mainstream.
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
Is less processing always more healthy? It's often touted as such but adding some processing can unlock nutrients vs eating raw, right?
Spinach for example, when eaten raw, has less bioavailable iron than if it were "processed" by steaming.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
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Recently I was eating my "standard" sandwich order from a local restaurant. It actually tasted so much better than normal that I asked if they had changed anything, only to find out that they had used their vegan cheese substitute by mistake.
I'll be giving these cheese substitutes another shot in the future!
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