A Vegan Cheese Tasting Evening to Remember

Ever since starting experimenting with vegan cheese recipes I’ve been thinking of organising a vegan cheese tasting to share my experience with my friends. And this Friday we did it, I think I can say it was a success!

I recently participated in a Vegan Cheese Summer Camp, a weeklong online workshop with classes to learn how to make certain cheeses and with very interesting and inspiring interviews with small and big artisan vegan cheese makers.

It was a fun event and has given me lots of inspiration to try new things to make my own vegan cheeses! And it was great to put some of the things I learned into practice while making these cheeses for the vegan cheese tasting evening.

The Range of Vegan Cheeses

I ended up making a range of vegan cheeses for the vegan cheese tasting. I made a vegan tomato cashew camembert, a variety of cultured vegan sunflower seed cream cheeses, a variety of cultured vegan cashew cream cheeses, a vegan soy milk based mozzarella, a vegan oat cheese, a vegan tofu based feta and a variety of steamed rice cheeses. Some of them I had made before and knew would be great, others were recipes I never tried before…

And my friends provided all the extras, the bread, crackers, tomatoes, olives, nuts, dried apricots and wine.

So What Did Everybody Think Of The Vegan Cheeses?

Overall everybody was very positive! It’s clear that even non-vegans can enjoy a well made vegan cheese!

There were some clear favourites, the cultured sunflower seed cream cheese with fresh herbs was a success (I will post a recipe later on)! The spicy sriracha steamed rice cheese was very popular as well (I’ve updated my vegan rice cheese recipe now to include the sriracha version), the vegan mozzarella (from the Non-Dairy Evolution cookbook) scored good points and so did the tomato cashew camembert (recipe by Full of Plants).

I personally felt the tomato cashew camembert turned out a bit dry (but still tasted great) but I’m sure that’s because the humidity in my little styrofoam cheese cave was not as high as it should have been. I’ll be experimenting a bit to see how I can improve that!

There were also some failures amongst the newly tried recipes. Unfortunately the vegan oat cheddar did not taste great at all and it didn’t look very tasty either!
I’m definitely interested in experimenting more with oats as it’s such a cheap ingredient and is locally grown, but will have to take a different approach than was used in the recipe I tried.

Another failure was the tofu based feta. I wanted to make some simple fermented tofu (a recipe shared in the Vegan Cheese Summer Camp) but didn’t have enough time to ferment the tofu so I ended up using another recipe I found online. The flavours didn’t work well and the texture was weirdly dry and grainy, nothing like dairy feta.
Now I don’t really expect vegan cheeses to taste exactly like their dairy counterpart, that’s simply impossible with different ingredients and processes but you want to create something that can at least fulfils the craving with a similar sort of umami experience and this vegan tofu feta just didn’t succeed at all.

How to organise your own Vegan Cheese Tasting Event

I made a lot of cheeses and that definitely takes a bit of effort and planning. If you like to make classic mould and aged cheeses like vegan camembert you have to start your cheeses at least 2 or 3 weeks in advance. The cultured cream cheeses need at least several days to ferment. And the cooked cheeses like the steamed rice cheeses and mozzarella need at least a day to cool down and firm up!

So if you decide to do a vegan cheese tasting event, go for it, but plan it with plenty of time to create all the cheeses. Choose your cheese recipes before deciding on the date of your event. I decided quite suddenly and not long before the event date to do this and managed to pull it off because I had already aged my tomato cashew camembert and chose the other recipes in function of my short time frame, but I would definitely have made some other more time consuming recipes (for the fermenting and ripening) if I had had more time until my event.