The Spruce Eats: What Is Vegan Cheese? Vegan cheese is a product that resembles cheese in its texture, its flavor, and to some extent its melting ability, but made with no animal-based ingredients. Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated best mozzarella vegan cheese techniques approachable to home cooks.

Vegan cheese is simply cheese made with plant-based milk rather than the milk of an animal. Vegan cheese is made using a similar process, but it starts with plant-based milk, like soy or nut milk. Both dairy and vegan cheeses are made by isolating the proteins in milk and processing them into a solid form. But since it’s made with added thickeners and emulsifiers, vegan cheese is more analogous to processed cheese, such as American cheese, than it is to true dairy cheese. The main difference in cooking with vegan cheese versus dairy cheese is that vegan cheese doesn’t melt in the same way, if at all. Dairy cheese is a network of milk proteins called caseins that hold little pools of milkfat.

Vegan cheese has a different structure since it contains no casein. This means that heating it creates a different result, typically a softening of the cheese rather than an outright melting of it. Still, vegan cheese adds a creamy mouthfeel and texture. This can vary from spreadable, as in cream-cheese style vegan cheeses, to longer-aged cheeses that resemble cheddar, which can be used in all the ways that ordinary cheese is used. Just keep in mind that vegan cheeses soften rather than melt, which means they don’t get stretchy. Vegan cheese is fermented, through the addition of bacterial cultures, so it has a tangy, tart flavor similar to that of dairy cheese. And through the aging process, the flavors are developed and concentrated.