Artisan Vegan Cheeses Review: Gouda, Gruyere, Emmentaler

If you are vegan and ever liked good cheese, chances are you already know about Miyoko Schinner's Artisan Vegan Cheese cookbook. It took a completely new approach to vegan cheese: using bacterial cultures to make the tangy flavors of cheese, rather than simple acids like lemon juice. They're all based on cashews or vegan yogurt or both.

Overall, her cheeses are incredible in terms of flavor, but at the cost of a soft, sort of grainy texture. Regardless, we've made enough of them now I figured it was time for a review.

Gruyere: This is probably my favorite recipe so far. It has a rich, complex flavor, a good spreadable texture, and the ingredients are things we already have in stock (although I realize not everyone has coconut oil or deodorized cocoa butter, we have a ton we're trying to use up). It's great on crackers, and really helped out a kugel we made. The picture below is of crostini with "hard" gruyere (still pretty soft), pears, and red wine glaze (recipe is in her book), which were fantastic.



Gouda: Sadly we don't have a picture of this, but I mixed it with BBQ seitan on sandwiches, for a similar effect as this BBQ pizza I made with commercial vegan gouda one time. It is pretty similar to the hard gruyere, but requires yogurt which I'm not a fan of: Also you have to rub the rind with salt before air drying, which I had trouble with, but it still came out really well. Definitely worth eating.


Air-dried emmentaler: We had high hopes for this as Sarah loved Swiss cheese. But it just tasted sour and weird. Basically it tasted like yogurt and sauerkraut (understandably, as those are two key ingredients). We tried a few ways to use this up but in the end gave up and tossed it since it was pretty gross.

In the past we've also made the goat cheese, fresh mozzarella, and sharp cheddar (see the write up of our vegan cheese tasting party for details).

Next steps include meltable Monterey jack, getting a "nut milk bag" to strain vegan yogurt to make air-dried parmesan (!), boursin, and camembert.

I also recently made a vegan brie from a kickstarter (see below), which turned out well. It was not very Brie-flavored (it had a very mild flavor, although it was complex and pleasant) but had a great rich texture almost like cream cheese and was nice on crackers. I want to try making it again, and compare it side by side to the Miyoko Schinner brie.

Vegan Cheese Tasting

We had some company recently so we decided to load up on some unhealthy snacks. We got corn chips - the round kind, and daiya, and sheese, and while they were here we headed up to pangea, and on impulse bought some dr. cow. So we had a cheese tasting. We put the daiya on the corn chips and melted in the toaster oven, and served the sheese and dr. cow uncooked. People really liked the dr. cow and nachos, the sheese was good but not the favorite. I am so in love with Dr. Cow. It has such a bitchin aged cheese flavor. Jon was like 'it tastes like cashews and tahini' and I was like 'blasphemer! it tastes like awesome, awesome aged cheddar!!'. I ate it on apples in the morning, just as I remember eating strong cheese on apple slices as a kid. Yum! Since we had sheese lying around, we made a super tasty (cucumber-tomato-sheese-lemon-herbs) greek wrap like you might do with feta, that was the perfect application for sheese. We also made chili daiya cheese dogs, and I had a mushroom daiya cheese vegi-dog like I remember from Mexico (well, I didn't have the dog part in mexico since they didn't have vegi-dogs there). So we got many of our cheese-based comfort foods of childhood taken care of. We heard they recently re-formulated teese so we'll see how that turns out.