How to make your own vegan cream cheese

Finding good vegan cheese isn’t easy, and the tasty stuff is often expensive. Why not try making your own at home, with this simple recipe

Buying vegan cheese at the supermarket can still be hit or miss. The selection is growing, but the texture and taste often leave vegans missing cheese made from milk. Yet vegan cream cheese is easy to make at home. Khoi Truong from the Berlin pop-up restaurant Good n’ Vegan explains how it’s done.

DON’T TRY TO IMITATE A FLAVOUR

“The most important ingredient is time,” says Truong. For his vegan cream cheese, he doesn’t use any flavour enhancers, just five ingredients: Almonds, water, salt, lemon and bacteria for fermentation. You also need a good blender and a cheesecloth to squeeze out excess moisture.

The process is based on classic cheese-making, says Khoi Truong. However, he avoids comparisons with dairy products. “I don’t want to imitate a taste or a flavour, I want to find my own,” he says

Here is Khoi Truong's vegan cream cheese recipe — 11 steps carried out over five days.

INGREDIENTS:

100 g blanched almonds, 500 ml water, the juice of a lemon,

1 tsp salt, 2 tbsp sauerkraut juice (non-pasteurised) and more salt to season

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Day 1: Soak the almonds in plenty of cold water. and whizz up finely with 500 ml of fresh water and the salt

Put the almond mixture on a clean cheesecloth and squeeze well, collecting the liquid in a saucepan. “The cheesecloth should be boiled before using it for the first time,” says Truong. If you don’t have a cheesecloth, you can also use a clean tea towel. However make sure it has been washed multiple times already, to avoid colour traces ending up in your cheese.

Next, warm the pressed almond milk in the saucepan over medium-high heat.

Leave the milk to cool for 5 minutes. Add the lemon juice and stir.

“This is to get the proteins to curdle nice ly and thicken up,” says Kho Truong.

Now leave the milk to coo completely at room tempera ture.

Pour the cooled milk mix ture through a clean muslin cloth and leave to drain overnight. The next morning you should end up with almond curd.

Day 3: Now carefully remove the curd from the cloth and put it in a sealable container Add the sauerkraut juice and more salt, if needed, and mix “The sauerkraut juice must be non-pasteurised, otherwise there will be no bacteria,” explains Truong.

Let the mixture ferment for 8 hours at room temperature then put it in the fridge.

Day 5: The cheese should be ready after two days in the refrigerator. It should be creamy with a subtle tangi ness.

Day 2: Rinse the softened almonds thoroughly with hot water. Put them in the blender

On day 2, put the softened almonds in a blender and mix them with 500 m of water and salt

It's important that all the cloths used during the cheese-making process are absolutely clean, explains vegan chef Khoi Truong.

After two days in the fridge, the cream cheese mixture is ready to be seasoned with chives and other herbs.