Vegan Cheese
What is the secret of making cheese without dairy that stretches and melts?
Is there a cheese addiction?
What’s the past, present, and future of vegan cheese?
And if you brought together the leading vegan cheeses from Europe and the Americas – like Redwoods Cheezly, Vegusto, and Daiya – that aren’t meant to be available in the same country, let alone the same pizza – who would win?
(28 min) Play or download (26 MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)
Spoiler warning: the results of the taste test are below the fold.
Casein and Casomorphins
Neal Barnard summarises the case for regarding cheese as a narcotic 2003 article in PCRM Good Medicine Magazine, Breaking the Food Seduction:
At first, the researchers theorized that it must have come from the cows’ diets. After all, morphine used in hospitals comes from poppies and is also produced naturally by a few other plants that the cows might have been eating. But it turns out that cows actually produce it within their bodies, just as poppies do. Traces of morphine, along with codeine and other opiates, are apparently produced in cows’ livers and can end up in their milk.
But that was only the beginning, as other researchers soon found. Cow’s milk—or the milk of any other species, for that matter—contains a protein called casein that breaks apart during digestion to release a whole host of opiates called casomorphins. A cup of cow’s milk contains about six grams of casein. Skim milk contains a bit more, and casein is concentrated in the production of cheese.
Traces seem unlikely to have a psychoactive affect, so we did not mention morphine or codeine in the show.
Casomorphins, on the other hand, are real and unambiguous; Diana examined the literature, discussed them in the show, and will also blog about them shortly.
Eva Batt’s Vegan Cheese Recipe
I followed a recipe for vegan cheese taken from a 1985 update of “What’s Cooking” by Eva Batt (1973), and you can see Diana posing with the 1980s vegan cheese. The recipe – soy flour, soy margarine, and yeast extract – represents the era more than it does Eva.
Eva Batt played a leading role in British veganism in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, including the “Open Door” film mentioned in our Born Vegan show and, of course, cookbooks.
How to Make Vegan Cheese Stretch
I sent interview requests to half a dozen companies, including Daiya and Redwoods, and was glad to speak with Mark, the Director of Vegusto UK, to hear his views on where the analogue food movement is going. Though it didn’t get a mention in the show, he’s vegan.
Dr Jonathan Gordon consults at Glasgow Consulting in Rhode Island, USA.
You might also enjoy “Cracking the Code: Making Vegan Cheese taste Cheesier” on NPR’s Food Blog, The Salt.
The Vegan Cheese Taste Test
We chose Redwoods Super Melting Cheezly (from the English Midlands, owned by Heather Mills) as the best UK melting vegan cheese, and Daiya Mozzarella style shreds as Diana’s favourite in the US.
London Vegan boutique Vx had recently recommended the new Vegusto No-Moo Melty, so we added that too.
This took place in May 2011; so this show was over a year in the making.
Method
Diana made two pizzas on storebought crust- tomato mushroom and spinach pesto, and I added the cheese in three concentric circles. From inside to outside, I put Redwoods Cheezly, Vegusto, and Daiya on one pizza and reversing the order on the other pizza. It’s important to be fair. All ten guests scored the pizzas out of 10. Let no-one tell me I don’t know how to party.
Results
The average scores for the whole group were: Daiya 3.2, Redwoods 3.9, and Vegusto 4.1. The four vegans ranked them the same, but with higher scores (5.3; 6.0; and 6.3).
Conclusions:
Use vegan cheese as a seasoning rather than a bulk ingredient, particularly with those who eat dairy cheese. Don’t forget flavour. It’s steadily getting better – this unknown cheese from Switzerland is actually reasonably good, and the Daiya Jack Style Wedge went down well with Diana’s mother and her husband.
Diana mentioned Gwendolyn Mather’s third prize with a vegan Daiya/Tofutti sandwich in the Grilled Cheese Invitational; Gwendolyn blogged about this for Compassion over Killing.
Thanks
Our thanks go to Robb Masters (who coincidentally reviewed vegan cheese for the London Vegan Campaigns vegan pledge) for the music, to our friends at the garden party for tolerating the taste test, and to Mark Galvin and Jonathan Gordon for talking with me.
And to the people who make vegan cheese. I still like it.
Sage Paider
July 31, 2012 at 13:45
Casein also contains lots of calcium and magnesium. When doing bodybuilding, i prefer to use casein as a protein source compared to whey protein. ,`;’`
Hope This Helps! http://www.foodsupplementdigest.com“>
Ian
December 14, 2012 at 14:56
Hi Sage,
I’m guessing that you’re a robot matching the word “Casein” and inserting a link, no more capable of assessing ethics than our cat. Otherwise you’d have read that – as Casein comes from the milk that mothers make for their own children – we don’t agree with taking it and using it for bodybuilding.
But just in case I’m wrong and you’re sapient ….
If you’d like to build muscles in a more compassionate way, the folks at Vegan Bodybuilding.com have lots of information on getting that protein and other nutrients.
You might also enjoy my interview with vegan Olympian Kara Lang.
Thanks,
Ian
Pingback: Cheese Addiction? « Skeptical Vegan
Kevin
December 14, 2012 at 03:11
A problem with the taste test is that each type of vegan cheese has a different ideal cooking method. It takes experience to learn the best temperature and cooking time for each type of “cheese”. Placing them all in concentric rings on the same pizza meant that they were all exposed to the same temperature for the same length of time. When Daiya is overcooked, it becomes creamy. The taste testers all complained about the texture of Daiya, which tells me it was overcooked. Daiya takes only a few minutes to cook. You should cook the pizza without the cheese and then add the Daiya within the last few minutes of cooking. If it has melted so much that you cannot tell that it was sprinkled on in shreds, then it was overcooked.
Ian
December 14, 2012 at 14:58
Good point. Thank you for commenting. But – looking at the photo – you can tell it was sprinkled on in shreds and hadn’t gone creamy. So, looking at it, do you still think I’d overcooked it?