The history of vegan cheese arguably starts with the production of fermented tofu in China and Japan. The method used to make fermented tofu—the coagulating and fermenting and aging of soy milk—is similar to the process used to make vegan cheese.
Some of the first plant-based cheeses that replicated Western-style milk-based varieties were made by Chinese food scientist Li Yu-ying, who brought his knowledge of tofu and soybean biology to France in the early 1900s. There, he made plant-based versions of many classic dairy cheeses, including Gruyère, Roquefort, and Camembert, and hosted extravagant meals showcasing soy cheese, vegetarian ham, soy preserves, and even soy bread.
Around the same time, vegan cheese was also popular in the United States among Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom follow a plant-based diet. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that vegan cheese became more widely available across the country.
Vegan Cheese Today
Since then, great strides have been made in plant-based food technology, and vegan cheese is no exception: According to Grand View Research, the vegan cheese market is expected to grow 12.6 percent by 2030. At the grocery store, you can find vegan versions of many cheeses, including Parmesan, cream cheese, shredded cheddar and mozzarella, and Swiss (to top your plant-based burger, naturally). In some stores, you’ll also find artisanal cheese-plate vegan cheeses.
Shredded cheese is the most popular form, according to data from IRI, a Chicago-based data analytics and market research company. Between February 2021 and February 2022, vegan shreds sales generated $56.4 million and vegan slices came in second at $53.2 million, followed by vegan cream cheese at $27.4 million and all other kinds at $3.6 million.
With growing consumer interest in plant-based products and an expanding vegan cheese arena, we wanted to learn more, including what’s in vegan cheese, how it’s made, what different options taste like, and how to cook with them for maximum deliciousness. After researching the market, we decided to limit our lineup to the most popular form, shredded cheese. We cooked and ate our way through a variety of vegan shredded mozzarellas and cheddars, finding a bunch of great (and some not-so-great) products along the way.
Why Is Dairy-Based Cheese Hard to Replicate?
Structurally speaking, dairy cheese is fat, water, and protein. Even with simple ingredients, it’s quite miraculous: It’s both solid and melty. Plus, it has a unique umami, fatty-but-tangy flavor that changes depending on how it’s aged and fermented. Animal milk contains a unique, naturally occurring protein called casein that helps give cheese its stretch. Simply put, casein holds the other components of cheese (mainly fat and water) together, so when the cheese melts, it won’t split. Younger cheeses, such as mozzarella, often have a looser casein construction, meaning that they melt well and get a strong, oozy cheese pull.
Then there’s taste. While there’s a great diversity of flavors in the cheese world, most are tangy. One source of dairy cheese’s tang is the bacteria added during the cheese-making process. The bacteria convert the natural sugars in milk to lactic acid, which gives cheese its tangy taste.
Both stretchy melting and cheesy tang are difficult to replicate, but vegan cheesemakers have a few tricks up their sleeves.
Anatomy of Vegan Cheese
Vegan cheeses are made with a variety of ingredients that attempt to replicate the taste and texture of milk-based cheese, but decoding the label can be tricky. Here, we break it down.
How Vegan Cheese Gets Its Stretch
Because there is no plant-based equivalent of casein, manufacturers turn to other ingredients, namely starch, to replicate the meltability and texture of dairy cheese. Starch helps vegan cheese melt smoothly without splitting. Three common kinds are potato, tapioca, and cornstarch. You’ll also sometimes find other ingredients such as xanthan gum and konjac (a gum derived from a starchy tuber) in vegan cheese, both of which help keep ingredients emulsified and lend more strength and stretch to the cheese.
Fat is another component that helps vegan cheese melt well. Coconut oil was the dominant fat in most of the cheeses we liked, likely due to its rich flavor, firm texture when cool, and unctuousness when melted. Some brands also use liquid oils, such as canola or safflower, which likely aid in melting.
We were impressed that some of the vegan cheeses (right) were melty and gooey enough to do a delicious-looking cheese pull in the same way that dairy cheeses (left) do.
How Does Vegan Cheese Get Its Flavor?
Dairy cheese gets flavor from fermentation, aging, and its main ingredient: milk. Conversely, many of the vegan cheeses we tasted don’t use a plant-based milk, such as soy or oat, as a base, and their ingredient lists don’t reveal much about how they achieve their cheesy flavor. One manufacturer told us their mozzarella flavor comes from “a fermented base of sugar, salt, starch, vegan cultured dairy flavors, and buttery mozzarella flavors.” While “flavor” or “flavorings” on a product label is a broad term, food scientist David Julian McClements explained that the flavor of a specific vegan cheese is often “produced from plant-based ingredients by controlled chemical reactions, heating, or fermentation.” Some vegan cheeses also turn to protein (usually derived from legumes or nuts) to add flavor and heft, while also enabling them to brown when cooked. However, this comes at a cost: Of the cheeses we tasted, those that contained plant protein were often more prone to being slightly stiffer and chewy when melted.
Cooking with Vegan Cheese
Given the challenges manufacturers face when replicating dairy cheese, we weren’t sure what to expect with their vegan offerings. We compared six different shredded vegan cheddars and mozzarellas from five different brands, tasting them raw and cooked in grilled cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, and béchamel sauce. We also baked them all in an oven on a rimmed baking sheet, covered and uncovered, to see how the shreds melted.
Some of the cheeses kept their shredded shape when melted (right). This was more prevalent in products that contained a base protein, such as legumes, and not so much in those that relied mainly on starch and fat for substance.
When melted, most of the vegan shreds closely replicated the classic stretchy texture of melted cow’s-milk cheddar and mozzarella. However, some held their shredded shape when melted. This result was generally more prevalent in products that contained a base protein, such as legumes, and not so much in products that mainly relied on starch and fat for substance.
Flavorwise, some of our favorite shreds were mild and tasted like a generic boxed mac and cheese or Velveeta. In fact, the cheddar and mozzarella were basically interchangeable, so you can just buy one and use it in multiple applications. In contrast, our least favorite cheeses had off-tasting and “sour” flavors, perhaps due to an unsuccessful attempt at replicating the tang of dairy cheese.
How to Cook with Vegan Cheese
After cooking extensively with a variety of shredded vegan cheeses, here is our advice for getting the best results from vegan cheese.
read moreOverall, our favorite cheeses got somewhat close to replicating the melty stretch and mild but tangy taste of dairy cheese, and our top four cheeses (two cheddars and two mozzarellas) were versatile and had a mild, cheesy taste.
