For the most part, it hasn’t been that bad; a lot of the changes I’ve been forced to make are healthier anyway. And vegan sausages and burgers are acceptable enough that I don’t miss the real thing.
The thing that’s hurting at the moment is cheese. I’ve bought 3 different brands of cheese and in all 3 cases I had to scrape them off my food because they were revolting. Bad cold, worse trying to melt them on to something.
I’ve been buying cheddar, and mature cheddar though, is that where I’m going wrong? Are there other cheese variety facsimiles that work better?
Emmy makes a “cheese” from potato. Starts at the tasting portion. She does say that while it doesn’t taste like cheese, it’s better than many vegan cheeses she’s tried.
My daughter swears by Violife. She says it melts just right. I just tried it and I’d say it tastes like an extremely mild cheddar. No off-tastes. Much better than any other I’ve tried.
Package says 100% vegan, no soy, no nuts, lactose, or gluten. She already tossed the outer package, so I don’t have the ingredient list.
Oops, correction. Violife isn’t the cheez my daughter swears by (although it tastes fine). The one she prefers is by GO VEGGIE. (other daughter brought home the Violife, so I confused them)
I don’t know if you’ve hear of Rhett and Link, but they’ve set up a site called Sporked that is all about taste tests like this. Here are the vegan cheeses their taste testers like the most:
And here is when they tried them out for themselves–both a summary and the video itself. I link it because they valued the meltiness of Daiya a lot more, and Daiya was my go-to, especially for their mozzarella on pizza.
If health was part of the motivation for going vegan, you might want to just skip the vegan cheese… Both of those appear to be mostly fat and sugar, without the protein of real cheese.
