Doing our small part to minimize the amount of animal exploitation and downright animal torture in the world, we have given up animal products including cheese. It's not because I don't like cheese and admittedly giving it up was the greatest challenge to my becoming vegan. I had to ask whether a few minutes of my own pleasure justified the unnatural life and torment forced upon a dairy cow. I'm not posting any animal abuse videos on this blog so don't worry but you can find them easily enough, if you dare.
Instead, I'm going to review a few plant-based cheeses (cheezes?) which are improving all the time. A few months ago I posted on Instagram about Violife, Vitalite and Daiyo cheese shreds which I had tried side by side, testing for their meltiness as well as flavour. This time I am expanding the test and posting here with a little more detail.
Unfortunately, during my testing and checking the ingredients and learned that one of these cheeses contains dairy by-products and is therefore not vegan! Stay tuned. Now for 3 pretty boring and nearly identical phots with a lot of statistics beneath them! Are you still with me?
The one thing about plant-based cheese is that it is a little challenging to get it nicely melted. We have been served a vegan burger and cheese where the cook clearly assumed that the heat of the burger would melt the slice but it arrived as nothing but a slightly floppy piece of plastic...not impressive. We even tried making nachos under the broiler last night and the result was disappointing. The best way to melt vegan cheese is with a cover and we did this in the microwave oven. It took 20 to 25 seconds depending on the brand. I started with the 2 cheeses I was most impressed with last time around. While both of these cheses were nicely melty and tasted pretty good if not overly cheddary, the Vitalite at IGA grocery store was only $2.50 per 100g making it the least expensive of all 6. There was no indication that it was a sale price. The Violife was a little pricier at regular price at $3.39 per 100 grams but these all go on sale regularly.
I was deeply disappointed to learn that my stand-by vegan cheese, Okanagon's Soy Co.Cheddar Flavoured Loaf is not vegan at all! The blame is on me for never reading the actual ingredients but I was deeply suckered by the lactose-free, soya and loaf (who calls cheese a loaf?) details...Fuck! This "loaf" contains casein, a dairy by-product which provides the dairy industry with profits making me a supporter of this terrible thing. If you are a vegan, DON'T BUY THIS! I hate being stupid. Do I seem a little pissy about this? It may now seem anticlimactic but the Chao Creamery Cheese is pretty damn good. It is also quite expensive at $4.50 per 100g (at least at Save-on).
Daiya has recently updated its formula and now uses "Oat Cream" which seems to work pretty well. While previously, it was my least favourite of my big 3 (it seemed a little too waxy) it is now my favourite and is very melty and probably the most cheddary. A loud shout-out goes to BabyBel which is a smooth melting very rich cheese. The dairy version is already expensive, while the vegan version is roughly 20% more expensive. Still, as a treat (and wasn't BabyBel always a treat), you could do worse!
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