Easy Tofu Cheese Spread

I haven't been able to get any agaragar for a while. This has made it difficult to make this recipe for vegan mozarella.

This hasn't been a huge problem, admittedly, for the simple reason that I really don't care about cheese any more.  I really don't.  It's just not relevant to my interests.

However, last Friday, Anthony and I made pizza - and I'll be posting about that later, it came out so well! - so cheese was required.  Since I didn't actually require it to be solid, as we were melting it anyway, I went with just thickening it with cornflour, making a spreadable version which worked really well.  If you use no thickener whatsoever, it's liquid, which is very rarely useful. 

Most of the flavour of our pizza came from the base - a wonderful garlic focaccia with rosemary - and the tomato sauce, which contained garlic purée, fresh basil, and oregano.  The tofu cheese was really only required to add some creaminess and a slight cheesy essence, which it did very well.

I also used it on a stacked sandwich I made for lunch the other day, where it acted like a mild mayonnaise with a great tang to it.

This tofu cheese is, as I said, closer to a mild mozarella than a strong-tasting cheese, like cheddar.

Ingredients

300-350g Silken Tofu (buy it from a Chinese supermarket for under £1).
1 Cup of Non-Dairy Milk (about 250mls.  I used soya).
1/2 Teaspoon of Garlic Salt
1 Teaspoon of Salt
1 Teaspoon of Rice Wine Vinegar
3 Tablespoons of Cornflour

1. Put everything but the cornflour and half the non-dairy milk into a blender, and blend until evenly mixed.
2. Mix the cornflour into the reserved milk.
3. Heat the tofu mixture in a saucepan until it starts to bubble, then, stirring continuously, drizzle in the cornflour mixture.  It will start to thicken.  Once it has, take it off the heat. 

This mixture will keep in the fridge for about a week. I've used it on pizza, lasagne, and on sandwiches, to replace mayo (I never actually liked mayo, to be fair, I used to be crazy fussy.  But the creaminess is really good).

To be honest, I find it hard to get through this amount in a week, which is why I rarely make it.  I also rarely eat tofu.  I'd never have expected it, but cheese really does become totally irrelevant, surprisingly quickly.

Queso Sauce

Another recommendation here - the Happy Herbivore's quick queso sauce.

As you can see, I ate it with pasta and broccoli.  It's a fantastic replacement for cheese sauce, and has this great oniony-paprika taste.  Today, I think I'll try it baked onto pasta, with a tomato sauce (or just tomato purée, because I am lazy and not going to tesco).

I made the recipe exactly as written here, no changes or substitutions.  Though I did leave out the cayenne pepper and added in some black pepper instead.  And added some flaxseed.

Sick

I am dying of the snuffles.  Again.

I have to go to work tomorrow!

I was feeling some of the symptoms last night, before I knew I was sick.  I was tired, and kind of hungry, but kind of feeling ill, too.  I still made most of that three course meal I was working on, but lots of it ended up in the fridge, waiting for me to feel better.  I took pictures, and I'll post up recipes later.

Tonight, I tried Lauren Ulm's recipe for creamy pasta sauce.  It does taste quite cheesy.  I made a couple of changes; I doubled the lemon juice, since I was using bottled, not fresh, and grated the cloves of garlic.  I'm not sure about them - I'm thinking a garlic puree would have been better.  The lemon flavour is pretty strong, too, and I'm still not sure I like the nutritional yeast I have.  It came out pretty well, though.

Marmite and Onion Roast Potato

This recipe isn't quite perfect yet, but the first try went pretty well.  I'm trying to recreate the taste of cheese and onion crisps.

I basically made my cheat's roast potatoes, only using the margarine/marmite mixture and onion salt.  There's an odd kind of beef gravy flavour on the bits where there's more marmite mixture than onion salt, but some are just perfect.

Vegan Cheese

Based on JenShaggy's recipe, here.

1 cup of Vegan Milk (I used soy) OR 1/2 cup of Cashews + 1/2 cup of Water.
1 packet of  Silken Tofu (between 300-350g, or around 12oz).
1/2 tsp Garlic Salt
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Rice Wine Vinegar
4 tsp Agar Powder

You'll also need a blender, a saucepan, and a bowl for the cheese to set in.

1. If using the cashews and water option, blend the cashews into powder.  Add the water, and blend a bit more. Otherwise, just pour the milk into the blender and go to step two.
2. Add tofu, garlic salt, salt, and rice vinegar, and blend till smooth.
3. Add the Agar powder and blend again, just to mix it in (I find I get lumps if I don't do it this way, but I suck at mixing).  Lumps are a very bad idea in this mix.
4. Pour into a saucepan and let the mixture sit for five minutes.
5. Bring to mixture to the boil over a medium heat, stirring occasionally.  The mixture should get thicker, and the flavours will change, and become more cheesy.
6. Pour mixture into a bowl, smooth over the top like brownies, and let it set in the fridge for about four hours.

You can make this without the Agar powder, in which case it becomes a cheesy-flavoured sauce, a bit like a roux or bechamel.   If you use garlic powder rather than garlic salt, you may want to adjust the amounts.

When set, this mixture should slide easily out of whatever it's been set in, and you should be able to grate it and slice it.  It does have a slightly garlic aftertaste, so you may want to only use a pinch of garlic salt, adjust the amount, or melt it on toast for cheesy garlic bread.  Oh yeah, it melts.  Agar powder does that.

As for where to get the ingredients; you can get pretty much everything except the agar powder and the tofu from a high street supermarket.  I go with tescoes.  However, the rice wine vinegar is cheaper from a Chinese supermarket, which is where I got the tofu.  Theoretically, you can get the Agar powder there too, but my local was out of stock, so I bought it from here.

Just a quick post

I made vegan cheese!


Okay, it's a little too garlicky and salty, but it definitely tastes like cheese.  I have ideas, to use proper powdered agar gar to solidify it, leave out some ingredients to make it mild like marscapone, leave out the garlic salt to make it taste like cream cheese...

It's really good with broccoli and pasta, too.  Yeah, I ate broccoli.

Cheese

I'm finding it hard living without cheese, on vegan days.  So today I researched some alternatives.

Looking at recipes, it seems like nutritional yeast flakes are used in vegan cheese sauces, so I ordered some of them from VeganStore.co.uk.  I also got a rice milk chocolate bar (apart from the P&P and the hassle of ordering them online, they're pretty competitively priced) and some vegan marshmallows.  I have a Plan, involving those last two items, some kebab sticks, a microwave, and some strawberries.

When I get the yeast flakes, I'm going to try a form of vegan macaroni cheese.  Most of the recipes are similar, so I won't post a specific one until I do it.

A few days ago, I made a vegan Sunday lunch.  Slices of seitan with gravy (made from granules, which are vegan, I checked), and mashed potato with salt and soy margarine.  Next time, I'll include some steamed vegetables, and maybe, if I can be bothered, make some vegan yorkshire puddings.  We'll see.  It was good, anyway.


Most of my meals don't include vegetables.  I wasn't raised that way, so I'm having to train myself into the habit.  I'm aiming to have some form of vegetable with every meal, and slowly increase the amount.  So, for breakfast, I had oatmeal with soy milk, golden syrup, and chopped strawberries.  Now, I'm snacking on a seitan sandwich with baby spinach leaves and an apple.  I really want to perfect tempura.  I've never liked corn before, but those baby corns were absolutely delicious.  I'll try some steamed, but I really want them deep fried in batter.

I find myself eating a lot of carbs.  I'm not putting on weight, because my diet is normally like that, but I'd like to change it.  So we'll see how the veggies go.  I've also found that most bread doesn't have eggs or milk products, so I've found myself snacking on that, a lot.

Apparently, the Canadian guidelines indicate that adults should enjoy 6-7 portions of fruit and veg a day, 5-6 portions of grain, 1-2 portions of milk or milk substitutes, and 1-2 portions of meat and meat substitutes (if I recall correctly).  I'd like to aim for that.

I'm also trying to drink a lot more water.  I have very dry skin, so it will help with that, too.

I want some vegan mozzarella.  I want to make vegan ziti.  My version will involve baking cooked pasta in sauce (probably tesco's own brand sauce), and covering it in some form of mozzarella.  In a pinch, I can use the macaroni sauce.  I'm also thinking of putting slices of seitan on a hot-dog bun and covering it with the cheese sauce.  I can also use that sauce as lasagne sauce.

I've found that there's a vegan food store on Allison Street, in Digbeth (Birmingham).  I've got a suspicion that it's in the same building as the Warehouse Cafe (which serves vegan and vegetarian food).  I'll take a look when I've got some spare time.

Well, I say that, but I still haven't found time to check out Holland and Barrett.

I also heard about a restaurant called Jyoti, which serves vegetarian food, caters generously to vegans, and is based around Gujerati food.  My father's family are from Gujerat, so I confess to having some interest in checking it out for that reason alone.

Most recipes out there are US-centric.  I found a recipe for vegan mozarella, and one ingredient that lots of people seem to have trouble finding is MimicCreme.  Apparently, you can make a substitute using cashew nuts and water.  Might be worth a try, if I can get my blender to pound them properly.  Apparently, sainsburys is quite good for stocking tofu.  I'm not sure about agar flakes, but I can get rice vinegar from tesco.  I could probably do with getting a new bottle of garlic powder, mine is pretty old.