Ask anyone flirting with a plant-based diet what’s holding them back from making the switch, and you’ll probably hear one word: cheese. Stretchy, gooey, salty, or sweet, fromage of all forms bewitches people around the globe—and many can’t imagine life without it. Cheese, though, is right up there with meat in terms of its environmental impact, and the average American scarfs around 34 pounds of it a year. So, how can a cheese-lover go on?
Miyoko Schinner probably knows more than anyone about bidding adieu to Asiago. A vegan chef, cookbook author, and faux dairy pioneer, Schinner has spent decades refining techniques to transform plant milks into convincing analogs of their cow-, goat-, or sheep-based counterparts. If you’ve ever perused alt-dairy at the store, you’ve probably seen her name on packages of plant-based butter and cheese from Miyoko’s Creamery, the company she founded (but no longer runs) that helped bring nondairy products into the mainstream.
Her latest book, The Vegan Creamery, aims to make those alternatives accessible at home. It’s a hands-on guide to using traditional cheesemaking techniques on a range of plant milks. (And before you ask: Yes, even the thirstiest, most energy-intensive nuts have smaller footprints than pretty much any animal milk.)
We chatted with Schinner about her approach, how to make at-home cheesemaking less intimidating, and why going dairy-free doesn’t have to mean giving up the good stuff.
Corinne Iozzio: Giving up cheese is a major stumbling block for a lot of people considering going plant-based. Why is that?
Miyoko Schinner: I was a cheese aficionado. It was the thing for me to give up when I went vegan. Back in the 1980s I was a cheating vegan, because I would occasionally eat a piece of Brie or pizza. It is also physically addictive, because there’s something that’s released when milk protein breaks down, called casomorphin. It actually gives you that good cheese high. So it completely makes sense that it feels addictive. I mean, it was for me.
On the other hand, what I discovered when I gave up cheese was what I really was missing was something unctuous and rich. It wasn’t necessarily even cheese. And so there are other options. The hope in my book is that this will be a starting place if you really, really miss cheese, here’s a place that you can go to to make some great options. There are some really easy cheeses that come together within just a couple of hours—and then there are some that take months.
CI: You’ve been developing plant-based dairy products for decades. How did you start?
MS: Really, it all began with me asking this question: ‘Dairy cheese is a coagulation of dairy proteins. Tofu is a coagulation of soy proteins. But why are they so different? Why is tofu tofu and why is dairy cheese dairy cheese?’
I wasn’t a food scientist. I didn’t understand the difference in types of proteins. The piece I was really missing at that time was fermentation. Cheese is largely fermented, so there’s a lot of things that go on in the cheese that don’t happen in tofu. Then I discovered Chinese fermented tofu: They take tofu, and then they bury it, and they ferment it, and it changes into something that’s really stinky and creamy. The first replica that I made was back in the 1980s.
CI: What’s different in your approach in The Vegan Creamery compared to your last book on plant-based dairy, Artisan Vegan Cheese?
MS: Artisan Vegan Cheese was largely about cashews, primarily because I was trying to find the equivalent of cow’s milk. What I’m doing now in The Vegan Creamery is not just exploring cheese. We start out by exploring all sorts of milks, not just the usual suspects—like almonds and oats—but watermelon seed milk, melon seed milk, mung bean milk, buckwheat milk. Then we figure out how each of those milks behave when they’re heated or inoculated with lactic acid bacteria or enzymes to coagulate. From there, we can figure out which works best for sour cream, cheese, ice cream, all of that stuff.
This is the first book where I found that I could coagulate milk proteins in plants to behave like dairy cheese, that I could drain the whey from the curds, press the curds, and voila, several weeks or several months later, you have a block of cheese—without any agar, without any starches added to it, simply milk itself coagulating.
CI: It sounds like that might ease some, well, uneasiness people have about plant-based dairy, particularly around how processed some products can be?
MS: One of the things that people criticize frequently about plant-based foods is that they’re often not very nutritious or clean. If you look at even some nondairy milks, while some of them are clean and nutritious, some of them are, you know, there’s like, maybe three almonds in a glass of water. I don’t want to put the industry down, but they add things like oils and gums, and I’m not sure that’s what people want to be drinking or cooking with.
“I think the fact that we’ve over-marketed plant-based products has given people the idea that the only way you can eat plant-based is if you buy these products.”
Miyoko Schinner
So this book is a perfect foray for people that are maybe curious about exploring how things can be done themselves. I’m a huge proponent of what I call kitchen sovereignty, of us reclaiming our kitchens as a place where we can actually make food from ingredients, understand how they work, and really take command of the food system in our own way.
CI: What does that look like to you?
MS: Ultra-processed foods are really defined by what you can’t make in your kitchen, ingredients that you wouldn’t have in your kitchen. So we have to figure out how we can replicate the flavors that we like but without having to go out and buy everything. We are at a point in human history where so much of our food comes in a package. It’s ultra-processed, and we depend on corporations to feed us. So many people even don’t cook anymore. So you grab and go, you eat in front of the computer, and we’re thinking less and less about the food system. And the danger of that is that not only are we losing our own ability to actually prepare food, but we are ignoring the impacts on the environment, on our health, on everything.
And so it is time to reclaim our kitchens and our understanding of food. Food is something that we as human beings have always participated in. It has been the place of joy. The table has been the place of joy. And this is kind of a very scary time, because we are moving away from that, and as soon as we forget that we have basically ceded control of the food system to the corporatized systems that are going to destroy the planet.
CI: You talk to a lot of people, and you also teach, do you find that most people understand the impacts of what ends up on their plates?
MS: I think people are overwhelmed, people are tired, people are too busy. People do not understand, and so it is a wake-up call. It’s not just greenhouse gas emissions from animals. It’s land use: Basically 50% of the farmland of the United States is dedicated to animal agriculture. It’s food waste: 40% of the food in the United States is thrown away. We can be oblivious to that, because we are so consumed by how we don’t have time, how we’re busy, our lives are busy, and in our busyness.
CI; Do you encounter any other objections to plant-based diary?
MS: I do a lot of talking to non-vegans. And the single biggest thing that I hear is that the foods are highly processed. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in veganism. Many of them are. I think the fact that we’ve over-marketed plant-based products has given people the idea that the only way you can eat plant-based is if you buy these products.
What people have forgotten is that until the last 100 years or so, in many places in the world, most people ate predominantly a plant-based diet. If you go and talk to any nonna in Italy, she’s going to tell you that she grew up eating vegetables and beans and grains—maybe she had meat once a month. We have not always eaten huge amounts of meat, and so we can go back to celebrating the way we’ve eaten for most of history without having to go out and buy new things that are in shiny packages.
CI: Some of the recipes include speciality ingredients like cultures. What’s a good place for a beginner to start?
MS: I don’t think everyone’s going to jump in and try to make some involved cheese that’s going to take three months—a Roquefort or something like that. There are easy recipes. For example, you can make your own oat milk. Oat milk, by itself, is fairly low in protein, so I add hemp seeds to it. Something like mung beans are also easy to come by, and I have cheeses that are made out of mung beans. Start with a yogurt that’s made out of chickpeas, for example. These are not really specialty ingredients, but there are high protein, nutritious ingredients that are available widely and that can help you kickstart your exploration.
CI: It’s interesting that you combine different nuts, seeds, and grains. We’re so used to oat milk just being oats.
MS: What I’ve really tried to figure out is how I can use the benefits of one and apply it to another. What works in conjunction? I made, for example, a yogurt just out of chickpeas, and it lacked richness, because chickpeas have no fat whatsoever, so then I combined it with coconut milk. That way I got some richness in the coconut milk and the protein and the thickness from the chickpeas. There’s a lot of marriage just between different plants.
CI: What was the hardest recipe to crack?
MS: I really struggled with feta. So most of the feta recipes circulating the internet use tofu, and the commercial ones are oil and starch. I tried it so many different times using different starches and adjuncts and gels, I just couldn’t get that crumbly texture and get it firm enough. And then I thought, Well, how is dairy feta made? So I watched some videos and read some recipes, and I applied that technique. Dairy feta is made by making the curd and then you press the curds, and then you salt the curds, and you let it air dry, and the salt draws out all the moisture, and after a couple of days, it becomes completely crumbly. And so I did that, and I was shocked that this soft cheese turned into this hard, crumbly cheese simply by salting the curds. That one is largely watermelon seeds, which is my new favorite milk.
CI: Making some of these cheeses takes a lot of time. Do you think that could hold back some potential converts?
MS: I am really trying to encourage people to use cooking as a tool for creating community. Come together and get into your kitchen and cook together. We’re all isolated. We’re having relationships with our screens, not with each other. So there’s a lot of problems that are running in parallel, and they’re all related, so they’re all intertwined.
Let’s cook together. Let’s make cheese together. And if you are alone, start with something really simple. I have simplified the butter-making process—made with just three ingredients. Or start with one of the simple milks. There’s also simple recipes for cheese. For example, I have a ricotta that’s very high in protein. It’s made out of watermelon seeds, and it comes together in minutes. So there are starting places if you’re alone and you just want to try it yourself. But I do believe that we cannot give into this notion of ‘I’m too busy and I’m just going to buy the instant package thing, because that is what works for me.’ Because that is giving power to the system that is destroying our planet.
We’ve edited this interview for clarity and brevity.