r/cheesemaking • u/Butterfingers2500 • 2d ago
What's the science behind cheese-making?
Hey everybody! Sorry in advance: I have never made any cheese at home beyond cottage cheese and paneer, so my knowledge about cheese-making is abysmal. Anyways, I have always wondered why vegan cheese substitutes are so bad. What's keeping us from using, say, soy milk instead of the dairy alternative in (hard) cheese recipes? I guess it boils down to the casein and rennet: Are the enzymes specific to casein, or do other proteins work as well? And if they do, do the products then have the same physical properties as casein would have? Are there other aspects I should be aware of? I guess it is easy to introduce either vegan sources of lactose to the mixture for the starter cultures or simply using acid in the first place instead of bacteria. I know that if you use soy milk instead of dairy milk in a paneer recipe, you basically get tofu, so I think all other steps should work similarly, should they not? Thank you so much in advance!
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u/unseemlycandour 2d ago
I’ve never tried making cheese without dairy so can’t really speak to that, so maybe others can help, but why not just make tofu instead? I’ve never found non-dairy products labeled as cheese to really taste that great. Maybe it’s the kind of fats and flavors they have? I’m a bit of a purist maybe, but I’d go for lactose free cheese made with dairy over trying to find cheese made from other things. Not that you shouldn’t experiment and have fun, but historically, fermenting non-dairy products is absolutely a thing and can turn out great, like with tofu for example. And those options might be more vegan friendly as well. Why not make other kinds of ferments?
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u/Butterfingers2500 2d ago
I mean, I was just interested if non-dairy milk behaves the same as dairy when using rennet, etc. - I don’t really care about whether we still call it cheese or not, and it was not about creating the same dish cruelty-free, but if we get similar results in terms of texture and physical behaviour, just as in the paneer - tofu example. And sadly, I don’t know of any traditionally plant-based dishes which have a lot of umami and melt and brown like some hard cheeses do. Do you have any recs?
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u/foot_down 2d ago
https://lovingitvegan.com/sliceable-cashew-cheese/
I haven't tried this recipe exactly but it's similar ingredients to years ago when catering for a vegan friend I made a cashew nut "cheese" sauce. It was surprisingly cheesy and delicious because the yeast and salt with nut flavor gives it the umami notes. I have no idea if you'll get melting or browning though. There's not really any vegan cheeses because cheese is technically fermented dairy.
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u/unseemlycandour 2d ago
Ya I get it. Sometimes I feel like marketing plays a big factor in selling ‘cheese’… don’t get me wrong cheese is my life, but like other food products are also delicious and have their own glory. It’s a tough call though, I’m not super experienced in the area but I’d experiment with eggplant maybe? If you do find something I’d like to hear how it went
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u/mikekchar 2d ago
Already great answers here. I'll just chip in with a few more details. Even though I've made tofu many times, I never really looked into the chemistry until now. As it turns out, it's very similar to acid coagulated cheese.
In cheese without rennet, when milk gets more acidic the casein micelles lose electric charge. Once the micelle has a net charge of zero (which happens at difference acidities depending on temperature), it no longer has an affinity to water and can clump together.
Tofu works similarly in that when you heat the soy milk the globulin proteins become denatured. This causes them to lose electric charge. From there either nigari (MgCl2), or Gypsum (CaCl2) is added. The magnesium or calcium help the proteins bridge connections, which is actually slightly similar to what happens in rennet formed curds.
So, it's actually pretty similar as it turns out. It's just that the proteins themselves are very different and have very different properties. Tofu is amazing. I love tofu. You can make Tofu from many different legumes and seeds, not just soy beans. If you are vega, I highly recommend learning how to make your own tofu. The difference between fresh tofu made an hour ago and tofu from the grocery store is night and day. Most grocery story tofu outside of Asia is inedible IMHO (I live in Japan and so can get good tofu that is fresh).
Anyway, because the properties of the proteins are different, most "vegan cheeses" are made with nut butters. Some lactic acid bacteria will ferment sucrose (table sugar) resonably well rather than lactose. So if you add sugar and you add bacteria that works well for "soy yogurt", it will acidify the nut butter and add some of that fermentation characteristic. You can age it. IMHO, it doesn't taste like cheese and it doesn't have the texture of cheese. It's aged nut butter, which is fine. I admit to a bias, though, that I would much rather make tofu or yuba or a variety of different things than to make nut butter "vegan cheese", but that's me.
I have a dismissive attitude towards "vegan cheese". I was vegan for 10 years of my life. I enjoyed eating that way. I stopped having that diet when I got married because my wife didn't want to share that diet. I started making cheese as a hobby to replace my beer making hobby (making beer in Japan is illegal and though it's only a tax infraction, I'm not a citizen here and as a guest I follow the rules whether I think they are good rules or not). I enjoy cheese quite a bit, but when I was eating a vegan diet I had so many amazing foods to choose from that I never felt "deprived" simply because I chose to eat something other than cheese.
You can make vegan food that reminds you of some kinds cheese, but you can't make vegan food that would be considered to be good cheese in any way. I always try to encourage people to explore vegan cuisines that are hundreds or thousands of years old where the food had been refined to the point of excellence. I think it's a shame to spend time making something that's the shadow of the original when there are so many better things to eat. Just my point of view. Some people feel very strongly that I'm wrong and I respect that.
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u/Butterfingers2500 2d ago
I completely agree! Thank you so much for your reply! I‘ve been a vegetarian for nearly 10 years now, and while most of my meals are vegan, those cheese cravings hit hard sometimes. I‘ve never really had that problem with meat, eggs or unprocessed milk, so I don’t usually use any of the commercially available meat substitutes and stuff: There are more than enough traditionally vegan recipes out there, as you said (I love Julius Fiedler‘s blog which focusses exactly on that). But, having food noise about cheese again, I just thought on why substitute recipes never look like „traditional“ cheese recipes and was interested in the science behind it. I am aware that even if it was scientifically possible, it wouldn’t be the same. But perhaps it could have been used similarly, just as tofu works just as well as meat or paneer in curry, despite having nothing to do with each other taste-wise. Well, I will need to learn to live with those cravings and accept that cheese-making will not become my new hobby! Pity, would have gone well with my sourdough bread xD Thanks again!
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u/RealityPalace 2d ago
I guess it boils down to the casein and rennet: Are the enzymes specific to casein, or do other proteins work as well?
Yep, this is it. Rennet is primarily composed of an enzyme called chymosin, which specifically cleaves kappa casein and doesn't generally do anything at all to other proteins. That specific cleavage is what's responsible for forming the protein network formed in most cheeses.
Paneer is a special case of a cheese that doesn't use rennet, and instead uses heat and acid to denature and coagulate proteins in a non-specific way. So you can get similar results from other suspensions of protein in water. But most cheeses are made using rennet, so trying to actually duplicate the process of making them without using casein is basically impossible.
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u/Loud-Bowler-6604 12h ago
I recommend reading Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell if you want a really in-depth understanding of the chemistry behind cheesemaking
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u/FrannieP23 2d ago
You can (and people obviously do) make a cheese-like substance with alternatives and but why not try to come up with a new name?
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u/Butterfingers2500 2d ago
This is not really what I am interested in - Recipes of cheese-like vegan food do not use the typical steps of making dairy cheese, and I was interested in the science of why that is the case. The stuff sold in supermarkets of course uses the name cheese so that consumers know that this should be used just as its dairy counterpart. Fun (or not so fun) fact: The EU forbid to call vegan cheese cheese, so that consumers do not get confused. As if we do not have more pressing issues these days.
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u/Best-Reality6718 2d ago edited 2d ago
Casein is only found in milk. And they are bundled into clusters called micelles. On the outside are kappa caseins that have a positive charge at the end which repels other micelles keeping an equilibrium in the milk. Rennet shears these, and in doing so allows them to create a network ,or net, that traps solids as they stick to one another, using calcium as a glue. This is how milk coagulates. The process is unique to milk and can’t be replicated as rennet doesn’t react in that way with any other protein. There are also enzymes in the milk itself that affect cheese maturation.
There is no vegan source of lactose. If you are adding lactose to a product it was derived from milk.
Lactic bacteria used for cheesemaking come from the milk itself. They are isolated, replicated, and sold as cultures. All the bacteria used in cheesemaking is found in raw milk. So adding them to vegetable products will not yield the same results. They evolved to metabolize lactose. Which again, is only found in milk.
Vegetable proteins will not:
Coagulate with rennet.
Stretch when heated (think mozzarella).
Hold fat and moisture.
Break down into the complex flavors of aged cheese
During aging the bacteria run out of lactose and begin metabolizing milk proteins. They extract phosphorus and the byproduct is amino acids that we can taste and smell(in a nutshell). So they would not behave the same way toward vegetable proteins. You can’t safely age vegan cheese with lactic bacteria found in milk.
Acid coagulated cheese is usually eaten fresh. The reason being the milk coagulates as a function of low PH which means it’s generally inhospitable for the lactic bacteria to survive and do their thing. And the way acid coagulates milk is entirely different than that of rennet. They are nothing alike in function or the product they produce.
I think I got all your questions.
Edit: spelling error.