Cow-free cheese experiments, part 2: Homemade vegan mozzarella

As part of our ongoing effort to reduce our dairy consumption, Brian and I have been experimenting for several months with vegan alternatives to cheese. We discovered that straight-up nutritional yeast, or a mixture of nutritional yeast and salt, makes a very decent alternative to parmesan, and that replacing the Monterey Jack in a burrito with sliced avocado makes an equally agreeable variation in flavor and texture. But the cheese we use most is mozzarella, and we had a lot of trouble finding a decent substitute for that. Of the two non-dairy substitutes we found at Trader Joe's, one had almost no flavor, and the other had a flavor and texture that both of us found disgusting. It seemed like if we wanted a decent mozzarella substitute, we'd have to make it ourselves.

I found a recipe on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken that billed itself as "The Best Vegan Mozzarella," and if the chef's description was to be believed, it deserved the title. According to her claims, not only were the flavor and texture just like real mozzarella, it would also melt like the real thing, something most vegan substitutes had stubbornly failed to do. The process was simple: just mix everything in a blender, pour it into a mold, and chill until set. And most of the ingredients were things we could easily pick up at the supermarket.

The only weird ingredient in this recipe was kappa carageenan, a seaweed-based powder that's apparently the key to its successful melting. Some people claim that carageenan causes inflammation of the digestive tract, but according to the nutritionist in Scientific American, "the vast majority of individuals" can tolerate it just fine. For those who happen to be sensitive to it, there's an alternative version of the recipe that uses agar-agar, but this version isn't as easy to make and doesn't melt as well. Since neither Brian nor I have any reason to think we're carageenan-sensitive, and since we wanted our cheese to melt as well as possible, we decided to go with the carageenan form of the recipe.

Hunting down this ingredient proved a bit difficult. They didn't carry it at the Whole Earth Center, nor at any of the supermarkets where we shop. I ended up having to order some online from Walmart (which I'm no longer boycotting) for $8. The other ingredient we had a little trouble finding was tapioca starch; our local supermarket regularly carries this at Passover, but not, it turns out, at other times. So we had to go to Shop-Rite and pick up a bag of the pricey Bob's Red Mill stuff for $3.29. This will be good for several batches, and next year we can stock up on the cheaper stuff when Passover rolls around.

The rest of the ingredients were easily available. We already had some refined coconut oil in the pantry thanks to a lucky find on Freecycle in June, and nutritional yeast and garlic powder in the spice cupboard. We picked up a pound of silken tofu at H-Mart and a jar of sauerkraut—the secret ingredient for giving the cheese its fermented flavor—at Aldi, and we were ready to cook.

After a little initial confusion sorting out the instructions for the agar-agar version from those for the carageenan version of the recipe, this proved to be just as easy to make as the author claimed. We just put all the ingredients in the blender, in order, finishing up with the boiling water, and blended it until it was completely smooth.

Then we poured it into one of our bread pans...

...and chilled it for about an hour. The finished product wasn't quite as firm as a real block of mozarella, but it sliced and grated just like the real thing.

We each tasted one of the shreds and found that its flavor was, to all intents and purposes, identical to real mozzarella. The texture, again, was perhaps a little softer, but much better than any other substitute we'd tried.

We stirred a cupful of this into a batch of Pasta a la Caprese and found that it didn't melt as easily as real mozzarella in this recipe. Normally, when you stir the cheese into the hot pasta, it melts immediately, and you get strings of molten cheese blending in with the pasta and the fresh tomato sauce. In this case, the shreds stayed more or less intact and melted only slightly. But Brian thought this was an improvement in some ways, since it made the cheese easier to distribute evenly throughout the pot of pasta. The texture wasn't quite as exquisite with mostly-solid shreds of cheese instead of strings of melted cheese, but the flavor left us nothing to complain about.

We both had some more of this pasta for lunch the next day. Brian ate his cold, and he reported that when consumed this way, the vegan version was actually superior to the original. As he put it, the non-melted cheese stayed separate from the sauce, instead of "turning into a goo." As for me, I reheated mine in the microwave and discovered that, after a minute on high, the fake cheese actually did melt; apparently, it just needed a little more heat than it could get from merely being sprinkled on hot pasta. Melted, it was actually quite a bit more molten and oozy than real cheese; it doesn't have the same stretchiness, so it just turns into a liquid rather than a stretchy semi-solid. But this experience gave me high hopes that the other half of the cheese we'd made would melt properly on a pizza, unlike the substitutes we'd tried before.

We tried this experiment last night, and sure enough, it worked. Here's how the pizza looked fresh out of the oven. As you can see, the faux-zarella didn't brown like real mozzarella, but it melted just fine, covering the entire surface. The only problem with it was that, once again, it was a little more liquid than the real thing, so it had a tendency to slide off the pizza a bit. But once we'd let it cool, it was pretty much indistinguishable.

Here's how the leftover pizza looked this afternoon, after a whole night in the fridge. Cooled, the faux-zarella didn't hold its shape as well as real mozzarella—probably due, once again, to its lack of stretchiness. Instead of staying stretched over the surface of the pie, it contracted as it cooled, leaving patches of the crust uncovered. But the texture of the cooled cheese was not off-putting, and the taste, as before, was fine. We've certainly had pizzas made with real cheese that weren't nearly as good.

We have one more experiment left to make with this cheese; Brian whipped up another batch of it just to make sure we had enough for the pizza, and he has stuck the rest of it in the freezer to see if it can be frozen for later use like real cheese. If it can, that will make this stuff even more useful to us. But even if it can't, it's a much better substitute for mozzarella than anything we've found before, and should work in just about any recipe that calls for it.

Although we plan to keep using this stuff regardless of the cost, I decided to calculate it anyway, just to see how it compares to the alternatives. The ingredients are:

• 1/2 cup soft or silken tofu. A pound of silken tofu costs $1 at H-Mart, and 1/2 cup is about a quarter of it. So, in theory, it costs only $0.25. However, unless it turns out to be possible to make this cheese in bulk and freeze it, we'll have to buy $1 worth of tofu every time we want to make just one batch of cheese, so we might as well call the cost of this ingredient a dollar. (We'll also need to figure out some more recipes that use silken tofu so none of it will go to waste.)
• 1/4 cup tapioca starch. We paid $3.29 for a bag that claims to contain 15 1/4-cup servings, so that's another 22 cents.
• 1/4 cup refined coconut oil, melted. We got this as a freebie, but it costs about $6 for a 14-ounce jar at Target (it's more expensive than the unrefined stuff we get for $4 a jar at Aldi). The jar contains 27 tablespoons, so a quarter-cup is 89 cents.
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast. We got this from the bulk bins at the Whole Earth Center, but neglected to write down the price. I recently checked the price at the George Street Co-Op and it was $11 a pound, which Brian is sure is more expensive, so at a guess, we'll say it was $9 a pound. A 5-ounce bag from Bob's Red Mill contains 9 1/4-cup servings, or 36 tablespoons, so that's about 115 tablespoons per pound, making it another 16 cents for two tablespoons.
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kappa carrageenan. I bought a 2-ounce bag on Walmart.com for $7.95, with free shipping. It contains a mere 16 teaspoons so 1 1/2 tablespoons (4.5 teaspoons) is a little more than a quarter of the bag. That makes this the priciest ingredient, at $2.24. But if we start making this stuff on a regular basis, I can start buying the kappa carageenan in a larger package and cut the price to about $1.41.
• 1 tablespoon sauerkraut. We bought a 24-ounce jar, which contains eight 1/2-cup servings, for $1.69 at Aldi. That makes the cost of one tablespoon less than 3 cents. Of course, like the tofu, a jar this size will give us a lot left over, but it should keep for a good while.
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. I've previously estimated that this costs a penny or less, so call it 1 cent.
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder. We also buy this in bulk at Whole Earth, but we haven't checked the cost. Since we used so little of it, I'm going to say that this costs 1 cent as well.
• 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Essentially free.

Add that all together, and you get a cost of $4.56 per batch. A batch makes two cups of shredded cheese, which is the equivalent of about half a pound of real mozzarella. So this works out to about $9.12 per pound. That's a lot more than real mozzarella, but it's less than Daiya ($11.50 a pound), the only other vegan mozzarella we've found that was anywhere close to acceptable, and it works a lot better. With a cheaper source of kappa carageenan, it would be still cheaper: about $3.73 per batch, or $7.46 per pound. That's barely more expensive than the two alternatives we tried from Trader Joe's, which were both flat-out awful.

Our success with this homemade vegan cheese has made me wonder if perhaps we can cook up acceptable vegan alternatives to some of the other animal products we haven't found good replacements for yet. For instance, we've never found a good veggie version of Polish-style sausage, so when we (regretfully) quit buying kielbasa at the Amish market, we figured we'd just have to give  up this treat entirely. But maybe something like this vegan sausage recipe would allow us to enjoy grilled sausages once more. Or maybe these homemade vegan seitan tenders would work in our favorite chicken and rhubarb recipe where commercial chicken substitutes—usually sold in the form of breaded nuggets or patties—would not. Anything is possible!