the “cheese” is freeze dried tofu, cashew butter, corn starch, nutritional yeast, soy milk, and vinegar
i live in nyc so i’m expecting the nypd to break down my door and arrest me for committing a hate crime against the entire Italian diaspora any minute now
I’m not vegan but do you mind a suggestion? Instead of trying to “hack” a substitute for the cheese, you could try a similar recipe that doesn’t use it.
Like focaccia. A well made focaccia is amazing, and you can make it with vegan only toppings: dried tomatoes, mushrooms, sliced and smoked seitan, figs, onions, some rosemary, and coarse salt. And lots of good quality olive oil.
I was never a huge fan of cheese, and cheese substitutes or at least the ones that i tried are so much worse. Some of them taste well enough, but have a consistency that makes my skin crawl. So i just do no cheese and it’s so much better imo.
I’m not vegan but I was at a dinner party once and accidentally picked the vegan cheese platter instead of the normal one. It can’t be that bad, I remember thinking.
It was. I don’t mind vegan food, there’s a lot I like, but I think they would’ve been better off making something different instead of trying to imitate cheese.
I’ve had some truly terrible vegan “cheese” (even some that was worse than the above tofu abomination) but also some really decent ones. Are they worth trying if you’re not hilariously lactose intolerant or vegan? No. lol
Dude I’m going to the Italian bakery tomorrow just for their foccacia
focaccia has been on my to-make list for a while
I’m also not vegan lol
I’m generally a lover of all food and a typical mistake I see is people trying make non-vegan dishes vegan.
There’s just no substituting real cheese on a hot dish. It’s just one of those things.
However there are plenty of great vegan and vegetarian dishes out there. And in my personal opinion, the simpler they are, the better they taste. No reason to bend over backwards to emulate cheese.
my reason was i wanted pizza at 3am
You have to admire someone who wants pizza at 3am and actually does it from “scratch”. I aspire to be like that. I just eat 45 olives.
I just eat 45 olives.
This is still making pizza from scratch, you just made some substitutions and cut some corners.
please do not aspire to be like me. for one thing, i was up at 3am and underemployed enough to have time to make this disaster
But psychoactive substances played no part in this decision, I’m sure.
i fucking wish i could blame drugs the fact that i was dead sober made it so much worse
Ah, the ambien munchies. Nearly burned down my apartment because I fell asleep for real once it was in the oven.
oh god I’ve nearly burned down my various apartments by just forgetting things in the oven normally. added to my list of reasons to never take ambien
i was staying with my parents for a bit and both my dad and i were on ambien. around 2am (where we lived when i grew up a train went by at that time) we’d both wake up, grab some munchies, then he’d hand me his munchies because he was going to be done eating and try sleeping, then i’d hand him all the munchies, and then he’d hand them to me, it’d go on til 4 until my wife figured it out.
i should ask her how long she watched us pass a couple bowls of popcorn back and forth. that has to be a great memory.
I can respect that.
I used to make a vegan lasagna that defies this claim. I am not sure I still have the recipe though
[X] Doubt (because of ‘vegan cheese’)
Didn’t use vegan cheese.
You replied to a comment about vegan cheese which seemed to imply your lasagna had vegan cheese.
Without cheese it is a layered pasta dish that should have some other name.
Once we replaced the noodles with zucchini planks. It was delicious, but not lasagna.
Also, I may have just answered what to serve with my pasta ala vodka, some breaded and fried zucchini
I can see how you’d think that but I specifically meant that it wasn’t bad just because it was an analog to lasagna. I don’t need you to believe me that it was good and I am not particularly concerned with what you think it should be called
If you didn’t use fake cheese then I am very inclined to believe it was good. There are tons of vegan dishes that I enjoy, just not the ones that have ingredients pretending to be non-vegan ingredients.
It is a crime, but also a punishment.
We sentence you too eating that whole thing.
No cheating, no chewing
it didn’t require much chewing to be fair
i was broke enough to make it when delivery lactose-free pizza was actually available despite it being 3am (i fuckin love nyc)
you bet ur ass i ate all of it. not letting that protein go to waste
(i mean it was edible enough i had it for breakfast this morning and wasn’t too salty about it)
The important question: did it taste good?
Literally the only question that matters.
no
When your name is mentioned in Little Italy, everyone spits on the floor.
You could have gotten actual vegan cheese instead of trying to make your own. I hear it’s quite good, too.
It is! But it was 3 am and the grocery stores are all closed
Wait what? I thought New York is the city that never sleeps?
i never sleep, the grocery store clerks seem to however
also a bunch of 24 hour places got nuked during covid :(
I’m not in new york
Ah, ok. That’s understandable. 🤣
Was it good?
no
pizza bad or bad bad?
because, y’know, bad pizza is like bad sex, it’s still pizza or something
somewhere in between. the crust and sauce were fine.
it’s probably bad bdsm tier. like you didn’t come but at least you got a good spanking, or something
T_T
We once accidentally bought a bag of preshredded mozzarella alternative. Missed the part where it wasn’t real cheese. When we made lasagna, it crisped instead of melted. Kind of like some French fried onions on top I guess. It was delicious, but it wasn’t lasagna
most fake cheese is made of mainly starch so that tracks
i wish i could find the exact product again. those little shreds toasted up like coconuts shreds. the texture was delightful. i’d mix it with animal cheese this time tho
was it Aldi brand by chance? they did not do a good job of making their nondairy cheese visually distinct from the real cheese
Daiya “parmesan” would likely do what you’re looking for. it’s really thinly shredded and tends to crisp when i use it on pizza
it could have been? it was like 20 years ago, sam’s club/walmart cheese. i don’t know if they were also aldi back then.
also, thanks for responding to my inane comments. i wouldn’t have remembered my zucchini/pasta ala vodka idea without you.
def wasn’t Aldi then as they’ve never been affiliated with Walmart/Sam’s. 20 years ago I’m impressed you managed to find a fake cheese at all let alone by accident lol
(also your comments are no more inane than my pizza was criminal)
Why go so heavy on the improvised vegan cheese the first time? Tomato and BBQ base layer, onions, pineapple, sweetcorn, mushroom, whatever you like really. Maybe a light sprinkling of vegan cheese at most.
the cheese was so bad i wanted to just use it up
Godspeed and good luck. You’ll need it!
Less silly, I’ve heard how hard it is to get vegan cheese into any sort of tasty category. Wonder what it is about dairy that’s so difficult?
casein truly is a one of a kind protein
You can do pretty well by introducing lactobacillus to very thin silken tofu and then aging it like normal cheese, but that’s something that would really be better at a commercial scale and afaik, it’s not really on the market yet.
I live in Germany and they’ve absolutely nailed vegan cream cheese and have okay vegan shredded melting cheese, but I visited the us last year and the vegan cheese situation was dire. There might be gems out there that I missed, but everything was so expensive and tasted so hollow
is it like, all of the vegan cream cheeses are good or is it that one brand really figured it out and dominates the market (if so which brand as i have not eaten vegan cream cheese and if i’m gonna stay on top of the food chain i better get on it)
At first it was just oatly, but most generic brands are pretty good by now.
thank you for helping me fill out my bucket list (it’s just a list of stuff to eat, easily summarized by the word Everything)
Keep in mind that there are thousands of cheeses, all with varying methods of being made so trying to emulate any specific kind is going to be extremely difficult.
Mozzarella, gouda, and queso for example are frequently melted but parmesan and blue cheese would make terrible substitutes for any of those three. Trying to replace any of those with some other substitute is like replacing zucchini with cucumber. Sure, they might look similar but the taste and texture are going to be off.
All I can think of now is being able to drinking blue cheese! Oooo
🫵🫴🚪
Well, you can poison yourself as much as you want. Sounds disgusting, but who knows… Was it good? Because if it was, then you have done everything right – the only important characteristic of the pizza is if it tastes good to the owner.
it was edible
Better then Altoona pizza
American cheese would have been an upgrade from the tofu disaster I made, but it also would have made me fart a lot
I mix olive oil with nutritional yeast and add some onion and garlic powder + salt and white pepper. It’s quite good! Adding vegan cooking cream will make the taste smoother. I also prefer to dribble the sauce here and there or use spoonfuls instead of spreading evenly. Definitely better than some of the cheese alternatives!
mushrooms?
