I’ve done a few experiments in the kitchen with plant-based cheese and yogurt since my last post with varying degrees of success. These were my action points from last time -
Next up, I will try the yogurt again and use dairy milk powder to see if there’s any chance that it will set. I also plan to make a cheat’s vegan chèvre that will follow a similar process to the ricotta but with a twist.
Yogurt
I tried making soy yogurt again - this time I had some coconut milk powder from the local bulk foods shop, wrapped the yogurt maker in a towel and put it in an esky bag to help it retain its temperature overnight. It still didn’t work - it was slop, slightly more yogurt-ish than the first attempt but too sloppy to use as a starter for the next round. Sigh. I did look at a couple of basic soy yogurt recipes online before my second attempt and their method was the same as mine so I don’t know why it’s not working. I’m just gonna assume it’s the fact that it’s been getting down to below 0 degrees here at night.
Next I bought a supermarket coconut yogurt (‘CoYo’), Cocobella - very yummy. I followed the same procedure heat milk (to 85 degrees), allow to cool (to 45 degrees), add a generous spoonful of commercial yogurt as starter culture, add optional coconut milk powder for extra thickness, leave overnight in yogurt maker. The result - even worse than my soy yogurt attempts! I felt confident this would work because the Cocobella was so rich and creamy. I later read that coconut kefir water also helps with fermentation, so I will try again some other time with this additional ingredient.
Cheese
I did another batch of soy cheese. This time it was basically ricotta except I let it drain more than ricotta and placed it in a cheese mold for an extended period, turning and salting every 6-8 hours as you would when making traditional soft goat’s cheese (chèvre). In addition to salting I also added some nutritional yeast to give it a cheesier flavour than just ricotta - that’s the weird-looking yellow stuff you can see in the picture below. It turned out pretty nicely - next time I will try to incorporate the nutritional yeast during the cooking stage so that when I stir and then drain it will be more evenly distributed. That will hopefully make it look nicer and give it a cheesier flavour.
Here’s how the soy milk cheese looked when taken out of the molds,
on crackers
and with some roasted pumpkin, roasted shallots, pepitas and baby leaf spinach.
Next I tried oat milk. Previously I’ve written about the reason for our move to Orange - we would love to own a small farm with a market garden and I would like to make cheese. Until recently I’ve wanted a few goats to produce milk but my move towards veganism has prompted these experiments with plant-based milks. So - oats. Oats from sustainability and healthy soil perspectives are better options than - for instance - soy.
The end goal the would be to grow oats, make plant-based milk from the oat harvests and create value-add by producing cheese from this milk. The first step towards preparing for this is to be able to make ‘cheese’ from commercial plant-based milks. When successful I can then try to make the milk from the raw ingredient (oats) and make cheese from home-made plant-based milks. And finally grow it, turn into milk and make cheese. Kind of like a process of reverse-engineering. Pondering this idea a little further - growing oats rather than raising goats would mean not having to get up early to milk them each day and fencing would not be such a critical issue. Nice.
With these experiments thus far, I have followed procedures I’m familiar with for making yogurt and cheese but substituted dairy milks for plant-based alternatives. It’s only been after the fact when it’s failed that I’ve conducted further research. So - no surprises - the oat milk cheese experiment failed. There was literally no separation of curds and whey, so I’m left with vinegary, watery oat milk to use on cereal. Great. If you google ‘making cheese from oat milk’, you only find recipes for cheeses that use oat milk in combination with nuts such as cashews or almonds. I believe it’s because oats have no fat. Shame that.
I will have another go with oat milk in combination with soaking, skinning and blending almonds. In terms of our future on this hypothetical farm, it would mean we’d need some almond trees (bushes?), which is also a bit of a shame because almonds are super-thirsty plants. If it was only part-almond and the base ingredient was oats, I might be able to live with it. mrshill and I have explored buying young almond trees and keeping them in pots until we settle down somewhere more permanent but we haven’t yet found a suitable supplier. Time to take another look maybe, but let’s see if I can make a decent cheese first.