I swore off vegan cheese. Here’s why I’m a convert now.
If you want to eat fake meat, you have a buffet of choices.That was clear as I wandered the halls of the Future Food-Tech conference, a gathering of foodies reinventing what we eat, in March. Scientists and entrepreneurs served up simulacra of beef, bacon, chicken cutlets and even ahi tuna. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across the cheesemakers, tucked away at the edge of the event, that my taste buds snapped to attention.In the booth of Berkeley, Calif.-based Climax Foods, black-aproned staff raced to replenish a cheese board for attendees, who snapped samples of soft brie and aged blue cheese almost as soon as they hit the table.I grabbed a slice atop a cracker and bit in. The familiar creamy texture and rich flavors filled my mouth. Assuming I was meant to test this cheese against a plant-based version, I searched for another set of samples. None existed. All these cheeses were made from plants.Traditionally, vegan versions of animal products have signaled sacrifice, not indulgence, even as they offered huge environmental benefits. Vegan cheese, in particular, has had an awful reputation among dairy lovers. Many have been hesitant to even call it cheese.But now a new generation of animal-free dairy may be the first vegan food that tastes exactly like the real thing — no sacrifice necessary.Don’t believe my unschooled palate.The blue cheese I tried from Climax Foods is served by Michelin-starred chefs at restaurants in New York and San Francisco. Nancy Silverton, a chef featured in the Netflix documentary “Chef’s Table” who runs two restaurants in Los Angeles built around the wonders of mozzarella, says a vegan alternative is now good enough to rival her fresh mozzarella di bufala.“The splotch and stretchiness, it’s exactly the same as the current dairy one,” she says. “This is something that’s going to really be a game changer in the market.”I set off to discover the secret alchemy transforming even the most boring ingredients into luscious cheese — and what that means for your cheese board and the planet.Delicious and creamy dairy produces a lot of emissions, roughly 97 times more than soybeans, calorie for calorie. And most of the world can’t comfortably enjoy it: Nearly 70 percent of the world’s population struggles to digest lactose, the natural sugar in milk, if they can even afford it.Animal-free dairy promises to deliver cheese for everyone. And it’s making remarkable progress. While ground beef, pork and chicken from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are grocery store staples, they represent only 1 percent of the market despite more than a decade and billions of dollars in investment.Plant-based milks, on the other hand, already represent 16 percent of the liquid milk people buy in stores. Cheese could be next.“Cheese is now ahead of the game,” says food systems scientist Andy Jarvis, director of the Future of Food program at the Bezos Earth Fund, noting the field’s development has been accelerated by new ingredients and tools like artificial intelligence. “It’s like a cooking experiment on steroids.” (The fund was formed by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post)If you’re familiar with cheese with little or no dairy, you might like me have sworn off the category long ago. Its tacky and disagreeable textures reminiscent of Play-Doh or orange ooze, along with a list of questionable ingredients including gums, starches and oils, had me sticking to real springy balls of mozzarella or the sharp tang of Wisconsin cheddar.But two major approaches are changing the game. The first is copious amounts of computing power thrown at identifying new ingredients and discovering combinations of plants that mirror the real thing at the molecular level.Climax Foods, founded by data scientists, is embracing this approach. If both cheese and plants are composed of fats, proteins, sugars and minerals, says Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn, why not skip the cow and make the final product?“This notion that the only way to make cheese is by using this heavily metabolized plant material that comes from an animal is completely bizarre,” says Zahn, an astrophysicist who spent years working for SpaceX, Google and Impossible Foods before founding Climax Foods in 2019.The company’s algorithms scour a database of potential plant ingredients — seeds, legumes, plant oils and others — for the desired texture, flavor, nutrition and cost. Over hundreds of iterations, the formulas are winnowed down in the lab — and on the tongue — a process the company claims saves “thousands of years of tinkering.”It ages the cheeses with bacteria and fungal cultures, similar to those used in traditional cheesemaking. Just as with traditional cheese, these microbes do the heavy lifting of converting fats into molecules that yield the creamy, nutty or funky flavors we know and love in standards like Parmigiano-Reggiano and Gorgonzola — and eliminating beany off-flavors that trouble some plant-based products.Another company, New Culture, uses a second approach known as precision dairy. It relies on microbes rather than cows to produce casein, a dairy protein that gives cheese like mozzarella its delicious, springy properties. You’re probably eating something made this way already: Everything from vitamin B12 added to your cereal to the enzymes for traditional cheesemaking, replacing rennet extracted from calf stomach, is made using this process from yeast.The company then purifies this casein, which is identical to the protein in dairy, and adds it to plant-based fats, salt, sugar, vitamins and minerals. “If you can produce casein without animals,” says Matt Gibson, CEO of New Culture, “you can make a cheese that is truly indistinguishable from conventional dairy cheese with none of the drawbacks.”The real test may come later this year at Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. Customers kept asking for a dairy-free option, but previous nut-based mozzarella substitutes failed to impress: “As soon as it melts, you’re left with a mouthful of grit, a very unpleasant texture,” says Silverton. “It wasn’t a product I could work with.”After experimenting with New Culture’s early versions, the company eventually hit upon a recipe Silverton felt she could showcase on her most demanding canvas, Mozza’s minimalist Margherita pizza featuring just tomatoes, basil and melted balls of fresh buffalo mozzarella. The only difference, she notes, is the lack of lactose’s mildly sweet taste.Vegan cheese goes mainstreamShould you buy cow-free cheese? You may already have. It’s appearing in grocery stores and fine restaurants across the country.General Mills, the company behind name brands such as Betty Crocker and Häagen-Dazs, has used precision-dairy milk proteins in its (now discontinued) Bold Cultr cream cheeses, as is Bel Brands’ Nurishh Incredible Dairy cream cheese. Climax Foods says it’s supplying high-end restaurants across the United States and, soon, retailers. Artisan vegan cheesemakers are popping up as well, from Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the largest vegan cheese purveyors, to local operations such as the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Vtopian Artisan Cheeses in Portland, Ore.Many of these products are not being marketed as vegan. For example, Nurishh markets its cream cheese as free of lactose, hormones and antibiotics without mentioning the word vegan.For now, that’s mere marketing. Many of the products looking to cash in on “animal-free” dairy will probably underwhelm. But if they become both cheaper and indistinguishable in taste and texture from real cheese, a threshold experts say is fast approaching, they could displace many of the roughly 270 million dairy cows in the world.Then vegan cheese may no longer be called vegan. It would just be cheese.
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If you want to eat fake meat, you have a buffet of choices.
That was clear as I wandered the halls of the Future Food-Tech conference, a gathering of foodies reinventing what we eat, in March. Scientists and entrepreneurs served up simulacra of beef, bacon, chicken cutlets and even ahi tuna. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across the cheesemakers, tucked away at the edge of the event, that my taste buds snapped to attention.
In the booth of Berkeley, Calif.-based Climax Foods, black-aproned staff raced to replenish a cheese board for attendees, who snapped samples of soft brie and aged blue cheese almost as soon as they hit the table.
I grabbed a slice atop a cracker and bit in. The familiar creamy texture and rich flavors filled my mouth. Assuming I was meant to test this cheese against a plant-based version, I searched for another set of samples. None existed. All these cheeses were made from plants.
Traditionally, vegan versions of animal products have signaled sacrifice, not indulgence, even as they offered huge environmental benefits. Vegan cheese, in particular, has had an awful reputation among dairy lovers. Many have been hesitant to even call it cheese.
But now a new generation of animal-free dairy may be the first vegan food that tastes exactly like the real thing — no sacrifice necessary.
Don’t believe my unschooled palate.
The blue cheese I tried from Climax Foods is served by Michelin-starred chefs at restaurants in New York and San Francisco. Nancy Silverton, a chef featured in the Netflix documentary “Chef’s Table” who runs two restaurants in Los Angeles built around the wonders of mozzarella, says a vegan alternative is now good enough to rival her fresh mozzarella di bufala.
“The splotch and stretchiness, it’s exactly the same as the current dairy one,” she says. “This is something that’s going to really be a game changer in the market.”
I set off to discover the secret alchemy transforming even the most boring ingredients into luscious cheese — and what that means for your cheese board and the planet.
Delicious and creamy dairy produces a lot of emissions, roughly 97 times more than soybeans, calorie for calorie. And most of the world can’t comfortably enjoy it: Nearly 70 percent of the world’s population struggles to digest lactose, the natural sugar in milk, if they can even afford it.
Animal-free dairy promises to deliver cheese for everyone. And it’s making remarkable progress. While ground beef, pork and chicken from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are grocery store staples, they represent only 1 percent of the market despite more than a decade and billions of dollars in investment.
Plant-based milks, on the other hand, already represent 16 percent of the liquid milk people buy in stores. Cheese could be next.
“Cheese is now ahead of the game,” says food systems scientist Andy Jarvis, director of the Future of Food program at the Bezos Earth Fund, noting the field’s development has been accelerated by new ingredients and tools like artificial intelligence. “It’s like a cooking experiment on steroids.” (The fund was formed by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post)
If you’re familiar with cheese with little or no dairy, you might like me have sworn off the category long ago. Its tacky and disagreeable textures reminiscent of Play-Doh or orange ooze, along with a list of questionable ingredients including gums, starches and oils, had me sticking to real springy balls of mozzarella or the sharp tang of Wisconsin cheddar.
But two major approaches are changing the game. The first is copious amounts of computing power thrown at identifying new ingredients and discovering combinations of plants that mirror the real thing at the molecular level.
Climax Foods, founded by data scientists, is embracing this approach. If both cheese and plants are composed of fats, proteins, sugars and minerals, says Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn, why not skip the cow and make the final product?
“This notion that the only way to make cheese is by using this heavily metabolized plant material that comes from an animal is completely bizarre,” says Zahn, an astrophysicist who spent years working for SpaceX, Google and Impossible Foods before founding Climax Foods in 2019.
The company’s algorithms scour a database of potential plant ingredients — seeds, legumes, plant oils and others — for the desired texture, flavor, nutrition and cost. Over hundreds of iterations, the formulas are winnowed down in the lab — and on the tongue — a process the company claims saves “thousands of years of tinkering.”
It ages the cheeses with bacteria and fungal cultures, similar to those used in traditional cheesemaking. Just as with traditional cheese, these microbes do the heavy lifting of converting fats into molecules that yield the creamy, nutty or funky flavors we know and love in standards like Parmigiano-Reggiano and Gorgonzola — and eliminating beany off-flavors that trouble some plant-based products.
Another company, New Culture, uses a second approach known as precision dairy. It relies on microbes rather than cows to produce casein, a dairy protein that gives cheese like mozzarella its delicious, springy properties. You’re probably eating something made this way already: Everything from vitamin B12 added to your cereal to the enzymes for traditional cheesemaking, replacing rennet extracted from calf stomach, is made using this process from yeast.
The company then purifies this casein, which is identical to the protein in dairy, and adds it to plant-based fats, salt, sugar, vitamins and minerals. “If you can produce casein without animals,” says Matt Gibson, CEO of New Culture, “you can make a cheese that is truly indistinguishable from conventional dairy cheese with none of the drawbacks.”
The real test may come later this year at Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. Customers kept asking for a dairy-free option, but previous nut-based mozzarella substitutes failed to impress: “As soon as it melts, you’re left with a mouthful of grit, a very unpleasant texture,” says Silverton. “It wasn’t a product I could work with.”
After experimenting with New Culture’s early versions, the company eventually hit upon a recipe Silverton felt she could showcase on her most demanding canvas, Mozza’s minimalist Margherita pizza featuring just tomatoes, basil and melted balls of fresh buffalo mozzarella. The only difference, she notes, is the lack of lactose’s mildly sweet taste.
Vegan cheese goes mainstream
Should you buy cow-free cheese? You may already have. It’s appearing in grocery stores and fine restaurants across the country.
General Mills, the company behind name brands such as Betty Crocker and Häagen-Dazs, has used precision-dairy milk proteins in its (now discontinued) Bold Cultr cream cheeses, as is Bel Brands’ Nurishh Incredible Dairy cream cheese. Climax Foods says it’s supplying high-end restaurants across the United States and, soon, retailers. Artisan vegan cheesemakers are popping up as well, from Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the largest vegan cheese purveyors, to local operations such as the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Vtopian Artisan Cheeses in Portland, Ore.
Many of these products are not being marketed as vegan. For example, Nurishh markets its cream cheese as free of lactose, hormones and antibiotics without mentioning the word vegan.
For now, that’s mere marketing. Many of the products looking to cash in on “animal-free” dairy will probably underwhelm. But if they become both cheaper and indistinguishable in taste and texture from real cheese, a threshold experts say is fast approaching, they could displace many of the roughly 270 million dairy cows in the world.
Then vegan cheese may no longer be called vegan. It would just be cheese.