One of the hardest parts of becoming Vegan is giving up cheese. Cheese just makes everything taste good – right? So what do you do without cheese? You improvise and make your own vegan cheese sauce.
What About Daiya?
Daiya Foods Inc. is a Canadian food company located in Vancouver, BC that makes various cheese products from cassava and arrowroot. They have a definite cheese-like consistency and it melts! It contains no animal products or soy, casein, lactose, whey, wheat, barley, gluten or nuts. Perfect – right?
My one and only complaint with Daiya is it is still mostly fat. 60 of its 90 calories per 1/4 cup serving are from fat, namely safflower and coconut oil. Don’t get me wrong – it does tastes good, it kinda melts on pizza, but pick up a handful of it and look at your hands – it’s greasy.
So for those of us who try to follow a LOW-FAT Vegan diet – I needed another option.
Homemade Is Insanely Better!
I was making pizza one night and realized I had no cheese at all! None. Not being one to give up I started looking online for homemade cheese recipes. What I ended up with was more of a vegan cheese sauce – rather than meltable shreds for pizza. I simply spread it on the dough first and then added the sauce on top followed by lots of veggies – and let me tell you – it was good!
So good that the next time I made it the wife practically cleaned the whole bowl as a veggie / cracker dip before I had a chance to do anything else with it.
Yeah – THAT good.
So without further ado……I give you my
Ridiculously Awesome Vegan Cheese Sauce
- 1 1/2 cups raw unprocessed cashews plus water for soaking
- 3/4 cup water
- 3 tbls lemon juice
- 1/4 nutritional yeast
- 1 clove garlic
- 1/2 tsp brown mustard
- 1/2 tsp paprika
- 1/8 tsp tumeric
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
Soak the cashews for at least an hour – the longer you soak the softer and easier they are to blend. Once they’ve had a good soaking, drain them well in a strainer and then toss them into a blender. Go ahead and pulse them a few times to get them chopped up a bit. Add the water and the rest of the ingredients and blend until smooth and creamy. Stop every now and then to scrape down the sides – you won’t want to waste a single bit of this stuff. Trust me.
Like I said, you can use it as a base for homemade vegan pizzas, or as my wife will tell you, it also makes a killer veggie/chip/ cracker dip. But you might want to make an extra batch – just to make sure you get some too
