Satiate your meat, eggs or dairy cravings with these vegan substitutes
Animal cruelty and health are some of the reasons why many are adopting a vegan, plant-based diet, but one of the biggest is sustainability. Though removing animal-derived products from your diet can reduce your carbon footprint, you might be wondering how to replace your favourite meats or cheeses.
But the vegan products on the market can be suspect. All the emulsifiers, chemicals and stabilisers used to mimic meat, eggs or cheese don’t hold a candle to the original taste, and may even end up doing more harm to your health.
Luckily, nature usually has the answers—here are five vegan substitutes using natural and easily accessible ingredients that may possibly be even tastier than animal-derived products.
1. Cashew cheese
Though nutritional yeast is often used as a vegan substitute for cheese, it can be hard to come by. Using the same principles of traditional cheesemaking, you can make your own cheese by fermenting cashew cream at home.
Do this by blending cashew nuts with a little bit of water to get a cream, then add a dash of a probiotic liquid like raw apple cider vinegar and leave it out at room temperature. In the video above, food content creator Julius Fielder uses kombucha as a probiotic agent.
The live organisms and the yeast in the vinegar will ferment the cashew cream by breaking down the sugars and starches in the cashew, eventually producing a fermented, aerated cream that’s umami and aromatic. After refrigerating this mixture to thicken it, you’ll have a fermented, probiotic spread that stands on its own next to cream cheese.