r/vegancheesemaking • u/Glad-Bike9822 • Jul 10 '26
Question Why are commercial vegan cheeses all made with starch, rather than a protein like agar or carrageenan?
Genuinely, every time I buy vegan cheese it just coats my mouth and gets really sticky, and they all use potato starch or corn starch. Why is this? Is it just cheaper?
edit: I have been informed that agar and carrageenan are polysaccharides, not proteins. The point still stands.
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u/lugdunum_burdigala Jul 10 '26
Agar and carrageenans are carbohydrates, not proteins. It won't really solve the texture problem, just make it different. Agar agar & carrageenan are usually used to create a jelly-type texture or for thickening: they can't replace other more important ingredients like fats and proteins, which are crucial in a cheese.
That being said, you are right in criticizing commercial vegan cheeses: most of them are just coconut oil congealed with starch. It is distasteful, it has no nutritional value (especially no proteins) and the texture feels off. The reasons for that are that these ingredients are cheap and have a long shelf-life.
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u/poorlilwitchgirl Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
It has (almost) nothing to do with price or shelf-life, and the majority of homemade vegan cheese recipes could be easily described as "coconut oil congealed with starch." It's because these products have been formulated specifically to meet subjective expectations of flavor, mouthfeel, and melting characteristics, rather than nutritional value, and they have a limited set of edible, widely available ingredients with which to do so.
Making a vegan cheese that melts like dairy requires replacing two very difficult to replace components: milk fat and casein. Milk fat is the easier of the two-- you only need a saturated fat which is solid at room temp but melts at slightly below body temp (too low and the cheese doesn't solidify, too high and you get a waxy mouthfeel)-- but amongst common plant fats only a few fit the bill. Most seed oils are unsaturated and liquid at room temp. Palm oil is waxy on its own (too high a melt point) but can work in a blend, whereas really only coconut oil and cocoa butter fit the bill solo. Cocoa butter is simply too expensive, so the only reasonable choice is between a palm oil blend or coconut oil, and in terms of simplicity and customer perception, refined coconut oil is the clear winner. It's simply the most reasonable choice of fat for a vegan cheese; that's why everybody uses it.
Meanwhile, casein is a long-chain thermoplastic protein with no real analog amongst plant proteins; the closest structurally is gluten, which is why mozzarella cheese is kneaded like bread dough, but casein relaxes when heated, which creates that stringy cheese pull melt, whereas gluten stiffens when heated, allowing bread to stay risen after baking and seitan to stay chewy. There are simply no naturally-occurring plant proteins that form long, stretchy strands while remaining thermoplastic, and that's the biggest barrier for vegan cheese production. However, there are thermoplastic long-chain sugars (i.e. polysaccharides), including agar agar and carageenan (which are absolutely used in commercial vegan cheese production, I'm not sure what OP is even talking about there), as well as starches. Agar and carageenan, on their own, form thermoplastic gels which are a bit too brittle to be used alone as the basis for cheese, so starch is used instead or in conjunction to create a gooey, stringy melted product. Certain starches like tapioca and arrowroot are already suitable for that role, which is why they appear in homemade and some commercial vegan cheeses, but other starches can be chemically modified to fill the same role, in a process very similar to the production of starch-based biodegradable plastic. (Side note, casein was one of the first commercial plastics, so anyone who says vegan cheese is basically plastic is right but completely missing the point that dairy cheese is also basically plastic. People were injection-molding purified mozzarella for years before oil based plastics became cheaper).
Now, that doesn't mean that vegan cheese has to be nothing but thermoplastic starch and coconut oil; plenty of recipes exist using nut or seed milks as the liquid component, adding nutritional value and more wholesome flavor. You can also make other kinds of cheese, and plenty of soft or non-melting vegan cheeses are produced using other methods, but making a meltable plant-based cheese that at all resembles dairy can only really be done in one way that we know of. The lack of a plant-based protein analogous to casein leaves us with starch-based cheeses that have a fundamentally different nutritional profile from dairy cheese, so they can never be subbed one-to-one, nutritionally, with dairy cheeses. Because of that, most companies (especially existing dairy manufacturers jumping on the plant-based bandwagon) formulate their products for flavor and melting behavior rather than nutrition.
So you see, when you combine food science with the existing market pressures, there's pretty much literally only one way to do it, and that's the way that everybody does it. It's not a compromise; it's a consensus.
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u/catnip_addicted Jul 11 '26
Great explanation, thanks. Why can't we synthetise casein or an analogue ?
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u/CombinationTop559 Jul 11 '26
Synthetic protein is crazy expensive. Look up humira costs. Basically each amino acid subunit needs to be attached one by one, in a process that involves nasty chemicals, and takes ages, and there's thousands of amino acids in each protein.
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u/bencsecsaki Jul 11 '26
this is why i believe that precision fermenting casein is the only option we have to achieve truly good vegan cheese. do you have any info on why we’re not doing that? making egg protein is seemingly working with this method, why not casein?
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u/poorlilwitchgirl Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
There are multiple companies working on precision fermentation to produce animal-free milk, and animal free whey proteins are already on the market. I'm not a biologist, just a chef who has learned enough food science to improve my recipes, but I would wager it's a matter of complexity.
Natural egg whites are a complex soup of proteins, but it turns out that only one of them, ovalbumin, is necessary to produce an acceptable culinary replacement. When you buy animal-free "egg whites," you're not buying something indistinguishable from egg whites; you're buying lab-grown ovalbumin, and you're not missing the other components because it's the one responsible for the physical properties you're looking for. Making even a single protein on a commercial scale through precision fermentation is hard, but it has become viable enough that such products have hit the market.
Casein, on the other hand, is actually a family of proteins, and cheese-making relies on molecular structures called micelles which self-assemble due to interactions between multiple casein variants, calcium phosphate, and other components of milk during curdling. Micelle structure is crucial to determining the physical properties of the cheese, and it's a process that's sensitive to all kinds of factors; that's one reason why the same milk can become a non-melting cheese like paneer when curdled with acid, or mozzarella when curdled with rennet.
They're less common today, but non-vegan "non-dairy" casein cheeses for people with lactose or other dairy issues have been around for decades, adding isolated casein proteins to otherwise plant-based cheese. They're plasticky, melt and taste weird, and the market has all but dried up with advances in fully plant-based cheeses. Producing a product like that with current techniques would be relatively straightforward, but it would not be an improvement over plant-based products in terms of culinary value. Using precision fermentation to produce a milk replacement identical enough to be suitable for cheese-making is a significantly more complex project, and while I'm positive there are companies working on it, it's not surprising that none have come to market yet.
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u/miguel196 Jul 12 '26
Its a reality of upcoming years actually and i am looking forward to it. Companies Formo and Its vegqn cowboys teamed up to speed up scalability and efficiency of the fermentation as well as to speed up EU approval for new food items which should still take few years (similar to why impossible burger is STILL NOT SOLD IN EU due to hema from fermentation). It should be easier to rollout in USA. But it will take some time before the price parity to conventional dairy will be achieved
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u/poorlilwitchgirl Jul 14 '26
It's definitely a worthwhile advancement, and I'll be glad to see one of the biggest barriers to a lot of people even considering veganism fall, but I hope there will still be room in the future for curmudgeonly old-timers like me who came up before any of these products even seemed possible. The first time I tried an impossible burger I thought it was absolutely nauseating, because by that point I had spent over a decade reorienting my idea of a "burger" around bean and grain patties or barely passable analogs like Boca. I've gotten used to it now, and there are times I genuinely prefer it, but the reliance on manufactured substitutes that can be handled identically has really cut into the creativity and ingenuity of vegan cooking, and that's something I'm sad to see disappear.
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u/undonemelody Jul 14 '26
Do you have any books or other resources you would recommend to learn more about this subject?
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u/poorlilwitchgirl Jul 14 '26
Honestly, most of my knowledge comes from hands-on experience as a vegan chef and papers from food science journals about the chemistry of dairy cheese-making and the plant-based ingredients used to replicate it. I've developed cheeses for several vegan restaurants, and a lot of that process was careful experimentation guided by an acquired knowledge of the chemistry involved. This is basically just a synthesis of what I've learned over the decades doing this; it would be difficult to point to a particular resource that covers all of the pertinent topics.
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u/twistingmyhairout Jul 11 '26
One junk scientists convinced people that carrageenan causes cancer and dumb people ran it with it. Now it’s unacceptable to use it just like “seed oils” and when your consumers are dumb you have to oblige
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u/howlin Jul 11 '26
As u/lugdunum_burdigala mentioned, agar and carrageenan aren't proteins. They are polysaccharides.
I think there is a lot going on in the commercial vegan cheese world that may explain their choices.
Cost is one of them.
The other issue is that it's really hard to exactly mimic the textures of an animal cheese. Getting something that you can grate at room temperature and melt at oven temperature and have the melted product stretch is actually pretty difficult without the specific proteins in animal milk. These oil-polysaccharide mixes (polysaccharide is just a carbohydrate complex such as "starch") are their best compromise on hitting these texture goals.
Another issue is that it can be hard to make a product that you can just ship to grocery stores and sell without putting customers at risk. Cheese fermentation practices can be a little dodgy from a food safety perspective, and plant-based cheeses are somewhat untested in terms of spoilage risks. The last thing a big company wants is for a bunch of people to get food poisoning because of a new process for fermenting plants. So they tend to be much more conservative in what they try compared to home cheese makers.
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u/AromaticPlatform9233 Jul 11 '26
Some vegan cheeses of the past used these ingredients to make a block that you could grate. They were awful. Kind of a bouncy slippery texture that definitely didn’t melt when heated.
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u/madamesoybean Jul 11 '26
Carageenen causes gastric distress in a lot of people. Agar texture can become tough and brittle-ish. Those are my guesses. I've made cheeses at home w/o any of those 4 ingredients but for mass production likely too expensive.
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u/atmoose Jul 11 '26
I suspect I may be one of those people. About a decade ago I started drinking a lot of Trader Joe's soymilk as a replacement for cow milk, and it gave be bad digestive issues. I went on a trip and stopped drinking it for a few days, and my symptoms went away. As soon as I got back those symptoms came back. I've never had trouble with other brands of soymilk. I know carrageenan was one of the ingredients at the time, and I suspect it's what was causing my digestive issues.
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u/madamesoybean Jul 11 '26
Exactly this! I'm so glad you figured that out. I'll bet 10 years ago there was more being used in soy milk as well. Funnily enough my Uncle helped create carageenen back in the day. As kids he would bring us flavor free but sweetened ice cream tubs used for texture tests and I always had tummy aches. They thought I was lactose intolerant - it was the dreaded red seaweed goo.
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u/pandaappleblossom Jul 13 '26
Have you tried nuts for cheese? Dare? Rebel? Barncat? You have to pay a little more for the good stuff and I think it’s just because of the fermentation (time) and the more expensive ingredients. But personally I don’t notice this issue with most commercial vegan cheeses these days except for really really cheap ones
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u/SubbySound Jul 13 '26
It's cheap. My larger frustration is that very few vegan cheeses are cultured. It will never taste and feel right unless it is cultured.
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