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Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to use oat milk (and other vegetables based milks) to make derivatives like cheese or yogurt?

In my experience, the best non-dairy cheeses are made from culturing nuts. Miyoko's Creamery and Punk Rawk Labs in the US both use cashews (and sometimes include other nuts) as the base, then culture them. They both taste fantastic to me, though as a 20+ year vegan I cannot compare them to dairy cheese.

I've also had recipes that used non-dairy milk as the base. None of these were cultured, so while they can taste good, they generally don't have any of the tang or sharpness of cheese. This can be fine if you're trying to make a cheese sauce but it doesn't cut it for something that's trying to be like solid cheese.

If you want to make some at home I highly recommend the cookbook Artisan Vegan Cheese by Miyoko Schinner (of Miyoko's Creamery). The recipes are actually fairly simple, though I think it takes practice to get a consistently excellent result, which is why I'm lazy and just buy the cheese from her company instead of making it myself.

You can definitely make yogurt from non-dairy milks, and AFAIK it's done with the same strain of bacteria. In the US, these are available at mainstream groceries (at least in Minneapolis where I live) as well as co-ops and Whole Foods. I've had yogurt based on on soy, almond, and coconut milk (and maybe others I'm forgetting). My favorite is probably Kite Hill's yogurt. That said, I'm not that into yogurt in general, so I rarely eat it.

I really hate to say this, but for me the vegan cheeses are not "there yet" - or at least the ones sold locally in Stockholm. Which I think is a real issue with this kind of stuff - from living between countries I've noticed for example that the Netherlands has much better meat replacements, but Sweden has the better milk replacements, and I don't think the local vegan cheeses are made the way you describe.

It might be my Dutch privilege of growing up in the country-side close to a real cheese farm, but almost every vegan cheese I've tried here has a dissapointing "margarine" taste/texture - that weird watery feeling compared to real butter. I'm sure someone will figure how to recreate something resembling the missing taste/texture eventually though. (also to be clear: it doesn't have to taste like cheese, I just want it to taste in such a way that I don't miss it, and part of that is not tasting like margarine). But again, maybe it's an issue of knowledge not being wide-spread enough to create good local alternatives.

Yeah, I have no idea what's available in Europe. If what you've tried is not based on cultured nuts, I'd assume it's not very good.

Miyoko's Creamery also makes a fantastic cultured butter that's based on cashews and coconut oil (but with no coconut flavor). It's very creamy and hard at room temperature, much like butter and completely unlike margarine.

Sounds like it should work, coconut has that creamy texture by itself!

I had a lovely vegan flatmate who always cooked for me, I wanted to make it up by making a vegan version of my pasta dish.

To do this I paid a LOT of money for the best quality vegan 'parmesan'.

It was inedible and tasted like a rubber coconut.

Cheese in the traditional way, probably not. I think it relies on a chemical reaction that's fairly unique to lactose (and lactose is, as far as I now, a sugar unique to milk). At least I haven't seen or heard of anyone doing it (except a few biotech firms that are explicitly working on novel ways of achieving similar chemical reactions). If such a product exists it's really badly marketed (or very low volume), because I know many vegans that would pay a high premium for such a product.

Yogurt is basically milk with a bacteria that eats sugar added to it. You can do that with any product similar to milk it seems. Oatly produces an oat-based yogurt, and the Swedish market has yogurts based on (at least) soy and lupine as well.

Isn't cheese also produced using bacterial reactions that consume the sugars and form solids from the protein? I can imagine developing strains of bacteria that could live off a different variety of sugar. The difference in proteins present in cow's milk vs. vegetable milks seems like it would present a greater obstacle.

There is cultured vegan cheese, but it is a fairly premium product that doesn't get a lot of mass distribution. There's a recipe book for it called Artisan Vegan Cheese, and the woman who wrote it sells cultured vegan cheese and butter on her website and in upscale grocers like Whole Foods.

Not lactose, the protein casein.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet

The lactose mostly ends up in the whey, so most lactose intolerant people do okay eating rennet cheeses (and so can eat things like pizza and so on).

Canada-based Daiya makes a number of plant-based dairy-free cheese- alternatives, in a variety of forms, not just blocks but yoghurt and boxed mac-and-cheese.

It's popular among the vegans I know, and some of the better pizza restaurants (in SF) even offer it for vegan pizzas.

https://daiyafoods.com/

Daiya, like all vegan cheese producers I've heard of, use a very different process to achieve something similar to cheese. The end result is very good (I've tried it) but the original comment I replied to asked if you could use plant-based milk for making cheese, and I don't think Daiya's production process uses plant-based milk in that sense.

I don't know about oat milk specifically, but I've had yogurts made from soy, coconut and almond milk, and cheese made from almond milk and cashew milk. The yogurt is generally good if you like the base flavor of the kind of milk. The cheese is somewhat uneven in quality, with some being aggressively bland and others being pretty tasty. The best nutmilk cheeses I've found are Heidi Ho and Miyoko's Creamery.

Now I'm curious to get some Oatly and try one of Miyoko's recipes with it.

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