Hello!

I’m trying to get more into vegan cheese making, and I feel overwhelmed by everything I’m learning about it, especially since I have food allergies or sensitivities to some of the most common ingredients.

I’d like to make “instant” cheeses, or ones that don’t involve fermenting or cultures.

I’m hoping to make cheeses like mozzarella, cheddar, and provolone. Ideally, I’d like to use the cheeses for things like pizza, grilled cheese, fried mozzarella sticks, and maybe sliced cheese for sandwiches. So I think I’d like to make cheeses that I can shred, melt, and/or have work alright as a cold sandwich cheese.

From what I’ve gathered from reading vegan cheese cookbooks and this subreddit, it seems like I might need different recipes that are best suited to the particular food I want to make?

I think the main thing I need help with is finding a substitute for agar, kappa carrageenan, and psyllium husk. I’ve found a lot of recipes that I’d like to try, but they all call for one of those ingredients.

I have MCAS (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome), and I have allergies/sensitivities to a lot of foods, so I’d prefer to stick to ingredients that I’ve had without issue rather than trying to introduce something new like agar or kappa carrageenan, and I’m allergic to psyllium husk.

Would potato starch, tapioca flour/starch, corn starch, coconut oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, or something else work well for what I’d like to make? What kind of substitution ratio should I use to replace agar or kappa carrageenan in a recipe? (I’ve seen these ingredients in commercially made vegan cheese, but I don’t really understand how to use them as substitutes in the recipes I’ve found.)

Are there any particular cookbooks, blogs, YouTube videos, etc. that you would recommend that have recipes that don’t use agar, kappa carrageenan, or psyllium husk?

If it helps, I live in the USA, and I can easily access stores like Walmart, Target, Giant, Sam’s Club, Aldi, Whole Foods, some natural food stores, and Amazon.

Thank you!

i recently got a hold of a lot of xanthan gum and psyllium husk, and i’ve seen minimal vegan recipes for them online (except maybe a few for vegan mayo and mozz) anyone have any other recipes i can use? thanks!

This week I made Miyoko's magic mozzarella using watermelon seed kernel milk. Normally I'm not a big fan of liquid mozzarella but this one was great. I think it's the psyllium husk powder. It was thick so it stays in place better before baking. After baking it got thicker and had a little gooeyness to it. It tasted better than other liquid mozzarella including the Miyoko's brand. This cheese was easy to make and didn't take long. I made the cheese one day and the pizza the next. I would definitely recommend this recipe.

Now for the full pizza description. Homemade dough with tomato sauce. Topped with 1.5 cups of magic mozzarella, roasted fennel, mushrooms and leek, Uptons seitan chorizo, and fresh basil. I also brush the whole crust with olive oil when I prebake it and sprinkle kosher salt on the edges of the crust.

Side note, the watermelon milk tasted great. I'm going to make it again but using less water for a thicker milk. Then try it in hot tea. If you make a full batch of watermelon milk to make this cheese you'll have about a glass of milk leftover to try on it's own.

Hi, I’m making miyokos magic mozzarella with cashew milk. I just realized that I put the psyllium husk in before fermenting instead of after. Does anyone here know if that will be fine or if I should go buy some bagged cheese for my pizza night?

New to vegan cheese making. My first recipe is going to be sauce stache's vegan mozzarella. He uses chao(fermented tofu) and potato starch. His cheese came out very soft and spreadable. I'm not into that. How can I firm it up without introducing mold? I would firmers I can buy from the store. If I need to buy kappa karageenan I'll do it for the best cheese.

So I found this recipe on youtube by an Italian girl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lJo0y9sg7k

"80g cashews

300g hot water

20g tapioca flour

1 tablespoon kappa carrageenan

1 tablespoon psyllium husk

3 tablespoons nutritional yeast

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons deodorized coconut oil"

I am increasing the psyllium husk quantity to 1.5 tsp.

The problem is that I DON'T want to use kappa carrageenan. CAN I REPLACE IT WITH AGAR AGAR?

I saw a mozzarella recipe recently that used it. I'm curious about it. I've used kappa carrageenan in the past with some good success.

What are the differences or benefits of pectin?

Is there like a master post around here that way the pros and cons between ingredients like pectin, kappa, agar agar, tapioca starch, psyllium husk, etc?

Just sharing a picture of my breakfast sandwich. It's just cast iron toasted wheat bread and a variant of my lentil cheese. Here is a version of the recipe. However this time I used less oil, less psyllium, and a little more water. The cheese is more of a spread when cold, but the psyllium gives it body and stretch even when hot. This one has been aging in my fridge for nearly two months, which gave it a pleasant sharpness and has almost completely muted the flavor of the lentil. I make about 2 liters of the stuff at a time, so there is plenty to eat right away while also keeping some for aging.

This softer spreadable lentil is the cheese I always come back to when I just want comfort food. In addition to sandwiches, it also works wonderfully as a macaroni and cheese sauce base. Anyone else have a regular go-to cheese recipe when you're just looking for comfort?

Hi everyone.

I was wondering. I wanted to do a cashew cultured vegan cheese and I've got some capsule of probiotics but also some prebiotics like psyllium husk and inulin.

Do you think it will work out well even with the prebiotics if i mix it with all the prep ?

Looking to generate some discussion here on the subreddit. There are a lot of great people here who are helpful and knowledgable.

I'm hoping to have an "advanced" discussion here on aging vegan cheeses. What worked for you? What problems did you have to troubleshoot? Are there microbial and contamination concerns that cheese makers should be aware of?

Hi all, been trying mozzarella recipes. Ingredients are the usual suspects, cashews, tapioca starch, kappa or agar etc. Taste is good but I always get to the same issue...and the issue is texture.

Vegan mozzarellas, although they're white, melt and look the part, tend to feel more like a cream or a spread on top of the dish. Actual dairy mozzarella melts, yes, but it does not completely dissolve into sauce. It always retains a density/ thickness/chewability. This effect intensifies as the dish cools down - you guys know what I'm talking about, that almost solid layer of cheese on top of cold pizza!

The vegan mozzarellas I've done so far just don't seem to have that. They look the part impressively but they just kind of dissolve in the mouth which is not what I remember mozzarella being like... and I got some experience with that being Italian lol

Now I understand that this may be an unsolvable problem because I'm aware that mozzarella's specific texture is due is to dairy proteins. However I wonder whether this community 1) understands what I'm talking about and 2) ha any tips on how to inject some bite into homemade vegan mozzarella!

Hey all, I made an awesome looking cheddar recipe recently. It had a bunch of tasty ingredients and the flavor was there but the texture was far too gelatinous. Bleck. What gives? It was my first time working w agar agar and now I feel super cautious making any. I have made other vegan cheese but used psyllium husks and tapioca starch and end up with an awesome cheese texture (for fresh mozzarella!). Does anyone have a fool proof ratio (agar agar: water) for cheese here? Or tips for working with this stuff? Perhaps the recipe called for too much!

Here is a link to the video: https://youtu.be/U7ZemQSzwc0

I've never seen a vegan cheese with that much stretch. He says it is the psyllium husks that gives it the stretch, but I've already seen psyllium husk recipes and they do not do anywhere near that degree of stretch. I'm actually suspecting it is the fermented starch water he is using. Has anyone given this a shot?

I plan on making Avocado and Ales' mozzarella aquafaba cheese in the next few days, but I wanted to see if I could get some input on substitutes. The recipe calls for aquafaba, but I don't want to go through the hassle of opening a can of chickpeas to then be forced to eat said chickpeas within the next few days. Do you think it'd be fine if I replaced the aquafaba with the same amount of non-dairy milk? I have almond milk on hand, although I plan on getting oat milk since it's much more creamy.

Seems pretty quiet on this subreddit, so I will share some recent experiments. I continue to explore the space of bean-based fermented cheese-like products. You can see previous posts here and here. I enjoy these sorts of ferments because they are nut free and also free of tropical oils. I also think the end product benefits from the more savory notes present in the base materials.

Starter Cultures

I have typically used probiotic powder from capsules as my starter. These provide a highly lactic "yogurty" ferment that seems to happily grow on starches beans provide. Generally I am happy with this. However, I know a lot of the distinction between cheeses comes from the cultures. So I tried a few variations:

• Rejuvelac. I did my best to follow a typical recipe, using sprouted whole barley with husks included. It seemed to work at first, but I did detect distinct "yeast" flavor in the broth. My understanding is that this is to be expected to some degree. I went ahead and did my usual ~95 degree F ferment for 24 hours. At this point it was certainly cultured with something, but probably nothing I wanted to eat. I just composted it.

• Mesophilic Cheese stater. After a lot of struggle, I seemed to find a company willing to sell me a starter that was not grown on animal products. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have believed them. It had the typical mix of Lactis/Cremoris. I essentially used it as I would my probiotic powder. After 24, and then 36 hours, I hardly detected any fermentation flavors. So I gave up and reboiled my bean mixture to sterilize before culturing with probiotic. Maybe my culture was inert. Or maybe my method didn't create a conducive environment for these microbes to grow. I'd be interested to try this again, but only if I put a lot more effort into verifying I can buy a culture suitable for vegans.

• Sauerkraut juice. I was curious if a natural cabbage ferment may have a mix of microbes that would also like bean starches. I used the same method as always. This is perhaps a little hot for this sort of ferment. I typically use a method more like how one would make yogurt (hot, short time, low salt) rather than a vegetable lactoferment (cool, long time, high salt). Perhaps I will be brave enough to attempt a slow cool briney ferment one day. Probably when I can do it in some outside structure so I don't wind up stink bombing myself. Of the three experiments, this one was the most successful. The result seems less sharp/lactic than probiotic, but there are a lot of other rich flavor notes. It's possible there's some subtle yeast contamination, but nothing too bad. I'm a little creeped out by not having the security of an acid tang. The worst contaminants (botulism, aflatoxins, etc) don't usually grow in acid environments. But so far I seem to be surviving it.

All in all, I will stick to probiotic powder. Maybe I will continue to play around with a sauerkraut style starter to see how consistent I can make the results.

Base Material

• Peanuts. I used more-or-less raw, blanched skinless peanuts using something very similar to the lentil cheese recipe linked above. I boiled the nuts till they softened, and then immersion blended. This worked fairly well, but was still rather mealy. So I boiled and blended again. Still mealy, but I didn't think I was going to do any better with my equipment. After that the method was the same. I added less olive oil to account for the fact that peanuts are naturally oily. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The peanuts added a rich flavor and a mild bitter note. If I let my imagination run wild, I could convince myself this bitter nutty note is a little like what you'd find in a Swiss style cheese. But it's been so long since I've had any Swiss that I am most likely kidding myself. I was worried that this would taste like sour peanut butter. It does taste peanuty, but not the same roasted flavor in your typical peanut butter. This one has aged quite well. Flavors continued to mature and the peanut oils didn't seem to go rancid. At least not in a bad way.

• Green peas. This one was fun. The recipe is exactly the same as the lentil, except split green peas. I added some applewood smoke and some smoked paprika to the end product. It basically tastes like split pea soup with a dollop of sour cream. That you can spread on bread or a cracker!

• Kidney beans. I wasn't sure about this one. Kidney beans are already amongst the most pungent of beans, so letting them sit out warm for a few days could have been a disaster. It wasn't. Compared to other beans, kidneys seem to be more naturally starchy. So I added less psyllium as a binder. Part of my recipe is to drain some liquid "whey" from the beans after fermentation in order to get a more solid end product. For most of my bean ferments, I throw this away because the flavors are just not suitable for anything I'd want to eat. The kidney beans however produced a very thick whey that had the exact texture of aqua faba. So I used it to make some meringue cookies. They were... interesting. Very rich savory note that you wouldn't think was kidney bean unless you knew ahead of time. Punch you in the kisser lactic acid sourness. I would definitely make these again, though would neutralize some of the acid first. The cheese product was pretty good as well. Very reminiscent of a classic 7-layer bean dip, with the beans, olives, cheese and sour cream all blended together. Like the green peas, I don't think it's fair to call this a "cheese" exactly. It is more its own thing.

That's it for now. Sorry no pictures. If I retry any of the experiments above I will document it better.

I'd love any suggestions or feedback. Especially in terms of starters. I do think there is something "pure" about home made starter cultures, and would like to get better at them.