Best vegan milk and cheese substitutes?!
Also, can someone recommend their favorite vegan recipe and lifestyle websites to me?
Answers: I have been vegetarian (no meat, fish or eggs) for some time now, but am ready to also cut out animal milk products. I have tried soy milk but was not crazy for it, especially in coffee. I like cheese in savory dishes, but I have heard that soy cheeses are pretty uninspiring. Can someone recomend some milk substitutes that taste good, and that aren't full of dozens and dozens of man-made ingredients and chemicals?
Also, can someone recommend their favorite vegan recipe and lifestyle websites to me?
You'll have to try different soy milks. Just because you didn't like one doesn't mean you won't like them all. Personally, I think Silk is one of the worst tasting ones (except for the Very Vanilla.) I prefer rice milk. There's also oat, hemp, almond, hazelnut, and so on.
For coffee, the Silk hazelnut and french vanilla creamers are really good.
If you want simpler milk, take 1 part nuts to 3 parts water and blend. Then use a cheese cloth or a nutmilk bag and strain it. Then you know exactly what's in it, and you can leave it unsweetened or sweeten it to your liking.
Cheeses... eh. I wouldn't try a vegan cheese until your taste buds have changed. You shouldn't look at them as cheese substitutes, but learn to enjoy them for what they are.
If you're trying to avoid lots of ingredients, you're better off replacing them with something else instead of trying to imitate them; i.e. use guacamole on things you'd use sour cream or cheese on. It imitates the creaminess you get from cheese, but much much healthier.
If you do want subs:
Tofutti Sour Supreme is a great sour cream substitute.
Tofutti Sour Supreme Guacamole is nothing like guacamole, it's more like a french onion dip and is great with chips or raw veggies or on mexican food.
My favorite site is : http://www.fatfreevegan.com
There's also:
http://www.veganlunchbox.com
http://www.vegetarianlunchbox.com
http://www.theppk.com
http://www.goveg.com
I loved, loved, loved Silk brand soy milk in all its flavours. It's mostly organic and so good. Almond Breeze chocolate flavour almond milk is delicious, too.
I like Parma vegan cheese replacer, but have had terrible luck with other cheese replacers. Usually, they taste vile. I've heard Follow Your Heart is tasty, but they don't sell it where I live.
You can make your own 'cheesey' food replacers with nutritional yeast. My sister made this and it tasted pretty good:
http://vegweb.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=b6...
The Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet cheese is actually pretty good! And it actually melts. I've only tried the mozza flavour, but will try the cheddar next. The only thing is it goes bad pretty quickly once it's opened - mine went moldy in less than two weeks. :(
Silk soy milk is very good.
Hello!
I have found great information and recipes on www.vegcooking.com. They give great substitutes and other general cooking and lifestyle tips. They have a mock meatloaf recipe on there that is *excellent*!
I actually drink rice milk by Rice Dream. I used to drink soy milk a lot, but I found that rice milk was a closer consistency to the skim cow's milk that I drank before I gave up dairy. Milk alternatives is one of those gray areas....you sort of have to try a lot of different things before you find the one that's right for you as far as taste, nutrition and consistency are concerned. I'm not sure what brand of soy milk you tried, but you might want to try a different type. They are not all the same. :-)
The only cheese substitutes I've ever tried come in a green package....the shredded variety I tried is by Galaxy. It melts pretty well, but be aware that it has small traces of casein in it. (Otherwise it wouldn't melt well). The cheese slices I tried come in a green and white package (sorry - I don't remember the name for those but they are found in the same section). Those melt pretty well too and they taste closer to real cheese than the Galaxy.
Overall, I can totally live without the veggie cheese. To me, it has a heavily processed taste and I only use it every once in a while.
I hope this info helps!
When I first started using soy milk, I stared with chocolate and gradually went over to the plain, just soybeans and water. There's quite a Chinese/Asian community here so it's found everywhere fresh. Silk is good. Vita Soy I think is better. Rice Dream is great, and they have Soy Dream too. Hit the health food stores... you'll finds hundreds. Many others in the Asian stores too -- there's a great peanut brown rice drink I love and it's from Asia.
I just tried Scheese from Scotland. It's really good I thought. It is fashioned after real cheese. That is, the hard cheese that one would typically use to spread onto crackers or slice pieces off. I guess you would call that European cheese.
My wife is from China and she's never had cheese before and thought it was totally disgusting and repulsive -- basically the same way I react to blue cheese.
I consider the typical N. American cheese to be 'modern' style cheese -- added colours, rennet, and who knows what else. There are many vegetarian non-dairy cheeses, that melt like the modern type, but contain rennet.
With the vegan cheese... www.imearthkind.com makes a good N. American style cheese and it's works for grilled cheese sandwiches too -- I just used extra virgin olive oil instead of butter.