Vegan cheese revolution – now it tastes and feels like the real thing, and even non-vegans enjoy it

There’s a revolution happening in the cheese world, and it doesn’t have anything to do with dairy.

For decades, vegan cheese has had a bad rap. It was well deserved. Rubbery and often with an aftertaste compared to pencil erasers or Play-Doh, the plant-based varieties just did not stand up to the real thing. Now, a new generation of vegan chefs and food entrepreneurs has figured out what was missing: fermentation.

Vegan cheese “started out as How can we make something look like cheese?” says Miyoko Schinner, owner of Miyoko’s Kitchen, the artisan vegan cheese company based near San Francisco. “But the problem was that it didn’t taste like cheese. Then we realised that we needed to apply some cheesemaking techniques to develop flavour.”

Crafting vegan cheese using traditional techniques requires patience, just as with dairy-based cheese; the advantage is that a plant-based cheese can take less time to make, but it still requires a few days or even weeks to develop complex flavour.

Vegans are not the only potential buyers of non-dairy cheeses. There’s a huge portion of humanity – 65 per cent – that cannot digest dairy products [lactose], says Washington, DC-based vegan chef-restaurateur, Doron Petersan.

Kale Walch started experimenting with vegan cheese recipes about four years ago, after being inspired to follow his sister Aubry’s plant-based diet. “I couldn’t stay vegan without a good cheese replacement,” he says.