The Best Artisanal Vegan Cheeses and Why we Love Them (Hint: it’s Flavor, Fat, and Fermentation)
Editor’s note: January is “veganuary” and so it’s the perfect time to learn more about plant based cheeses. We welcome back contributor Ellen Kanner who last wrote for us about vegan cheese and explained how it is made and in what ways it is similar and different from traditional dairy cheese.
Cheese as we know it began in 7,000 BCE. As an accident. It’s had a few thousand years since to get things right, evolving and expanding to be made with different cultures, different milks from different ruminants. Plant-based cheese is relatively new in the grand scheme of things, but the flavor, fat and fermentation we love endure whether we're talking traditional dairy cheese or artisanal plant-based cheeses. Behold some of the best artisanal plant-based cheeses to date.
Violife, photo courtesy of Violife
A major vegan cheese brand with an agreeable price point, Violife cheeses are made with coconut oil and potato starch, rather than soy and cashews (two major allergens). Though the method and ingredients aren’t traditional, the heart and soul is. Violife is based in Greece and still maintains its Greek soul with a fine-grained product they call Just Like Feta. It nails the briny, funky, tang of traditional sheep’s milk feta. Just Like Feta is firm and sliceable, rather than crumbly, turning delectably creamy in the mouth. When sliced atop crusty bread and baked, the flavor remains intact, but instead of softening and melting, Violife’s feta liquifies — somewhat alarming. Not every offering from this brand is a winner. Violife’s cheddar slices taste more like bland, kid-friendly American cheese (not bad, but not cheddar, either). Kosher and non-GMO certified.
Violife, SRP $5 for a 8.1 ounce block. Available in most grocery stores,
Virgin cheese, photo courtesy of Virgin Cheese
The VegNews nominee for best vegan artisanal cheese 2020 uses the same primary ingredients as Violife, but ages its cheeses, resulting in an altogether softer plant-based feta which barely budges when warmed. Why? No casein, the magical enzyme in animal milk that gives traditional dairy cheese its stretch and melt.
That said, Virgin offerings are organic and savory with the pleasing fatty mouthfeel that’s such an intrinsic part of traditional dairy cheese. Their individual and distinct characteristics — a mildly funky bleu, a salty, punchy French onion among others — bloom at room temperature or slightly warmed. Fresh from the fridge, however, they suffer from a certain sameness of flavor.
There’s science behind it. “You get a lot of characteristic flavors of cheese —buttery, grassy — through aroma,” says Barb Stuckey, president of food innovation firm Mattson Group and author of the book, Taste “Aromas are volatile compounds. When you warm up cheese in your mouth, you liberate those volatile aromas. Heat helps them escape, then they make their way to your olfactory.”
Woman-owned, organic and small batch, Virgin’s a step up from Violife, but with that comes a step up in price and step down in easy availability. Get over it, you don’t mind spending more for an aged artisanal Laura Chenel goat cheese than a mass-produced supermarket brand.
Virgin, $14.99 for 5-ounce wedge, plus cost of cold pack delivery nationally available through online plant-based purveyor, Vegan Essentials .
Photo courtesy of Wendy's Nutty Cheese
This brand gets the prize for the artisanal vegan cheese brand with the most varieties;15 different kinds, including a tangy vegan (and goat-free) chèvre, a strangely popular blueberry rum de fleur, and three different cheddars, ranging from wine-tinged to slightly sweet. Founder Wendy Grossman is always developing new and seasonal flavors, too, with flavors that chime. Like Virgin, Wendy’s soy- and cashew-based cheeses are cultured with a smooth, cream cheese-like mouthfeel.
Cheddar and smoky cheeses, soft and spreadable cheeses, no problem, but not even Wendy’s Nutty Cheese has unlocked plant-based versions of hard cow’s milk gruyere, Emmental and provolone. True Swiss and Italian hard cheeses require more aging and culturing, and no one’s yet found the alchemical formula to create a vegan version.
Wendy’s Nutty Cheese, $14.99 for a 6-ounce wedge, with a 32-ounce minimum order plus cost of cold pack delivery nationally available through Vegan Essentials.
Rind, photo courtesy of RIND.NYC
Brooklyn-based RIND has mastered the art of semi-soft French-style bries, complete with buttery center, moldy, bloomy rind and a nuance of fug. It’s a happy marriage of traditional cheesemaking culturing and aging methods and plant-based ingredients including soy, coconut and tree nuts. RIND’s cambleu, creamy camembert kissed by bleu’s umami notes, won Specialty Foods’ sofi Gold Award It has winning flavor as well as winning structure. Co-founders Joshua Katcher and Dina DiCenso have perfected fermentation producing a true rind encasing a creamy but firm cheese. RIND also makes a semi-soft aged cheese with a tart sumac kick and another mildly scented with smoky, bracing, lapsang souchong tea.
RIND, $19.49 for a 5-ounce wedge. Available in Brooklyn-area markets and Vegan Essentials.
Giving RIND a run for the money is Jule’s, specializing in cashew brie, aged and cultured to yield classic new-mown grass and brown butter flavor and rich, fatty finish. Fat delivers more than happy mouthfeel. “Fat carries flavor. It stays on your tongue. It clings to the surfaces of your mouth,” explains Mattson senior food technologist, Kalynda Stone “A lot of the flavor in cheeses are in fatty acids. Sheep’s milk or goat milk cheese has a lot of different fatty acids. In order to get the same flavors, plant-based based cheese has to ferment, but in a different way, using cultures and miso.”
Jule’s and RIND know how to culture, producing cheeses cloaked in rind that’s almost cottony in flavor and texture in the best possible way. Both cheeses have a pleasing firmness but yield as they warm, as close to melty as a plant-based cheese can get without dissolving into an oily mess. RIND is a poem, Jules is a rhapsody.
Jules, $15.95 for a 6-ounce wheel. Available in many regional specialty markets and Vegan Essentials.
“To move the needle on factory farming and our planet’s health, to have an impact, I have to make cheeses that people will want on a daily basis,” says Catalyst Creamery’s Katie Jones. Catalyst makes a very Muenstery Muenster, mozzarella and dill-flecked havarti, all snackable and semi-soft but with definite structure, true flavor and more accessible price point.
Catalyst photo credit Catalyst Creamery
Catalyst’s cheeses are made with hemp, which imparts a soft vegetal flavor, is high in protein, and beats nuts when it comes to sustainability. Small, emerging and based in Sarasota, Florida — not exactly a vegan mecca —Catalyst is only available at a few regional markets. But don’t let that discourage you. Cowgirl Creamery started small and local, too. The most exciting plant-based cheese artisan may well be in your own ‘hood. Jones urges you to “find your own local cheese maker.”
Catalyst, $9 for a 6-ounce wedge. Available at select South Florida markets.
While traditional dairy cheese has a 7,000 year history, plant-based cheesemaking is catching up quickly. That plant-based gruyere may get here even quicker than the Covid vaccine. “If you see it in a dairy case, watch out,” says RIND’s DiCenso. “We’re working on it and we’re coming for you.”