Genetically modifying yeast to make.... milk.... to make.... vegan cheese?

[TimT]

'Cow milk without the cow is going to change food forever', enthuses the headline on Wired.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/diy-biotech-vegan-cheese/

The story? Bunch of scientists are trying to genetically modify yeast to make cow's milk. Once they get the yeast to make the milk, they'll use it to make cheese. They call it 'Real Vegan Cheese'.

Once you've quit your laughing at the improbability of it all, click on the link and have a look. Some of the ideas are pretty cool (if fanciful): they want to make narwhal cheese, for instance. 

[OzzieCheese]

Oh and I expect it to taste exactly like artificial 'vegan' food tastes - lifeless, tasteless, textureless and soulless.

[TimT]

I like their gung ho, give it a go attitude.

But the hurdles to doing this successfully are significant. It's not only getting the ingredients right (and there are thousands of them!) It's separating them out from the byproducts of the yeast and mixing them right and ideally having the right mix of bacteria in the final product too.

[TimT]

There are very old vegan cheese recipes available, interestingly.

For instance, almond cheese.

You make almond milk (soak the almonds in water to plump them up, throw the water away, then pulp up the almonds in more water and you have the milk).

Then you take the milk (complete with the grounds) and treat it as you would ricotta. Heat up and add lemon juice.

The lemon juice will actually cause a bit of curdling, and you chunk it up by taking the ground almonds and adding to the mix! Drain the whole thing out of a bag and you'll get a greenish yellow whey in the pot, and the curdled almond milk/almond grounds in a bag. Simple.

You probably don't even need to heat it up; I've found recipes for 'almond fetta' on the net that say you just chuck the almonds in a blender with water, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt.

And not that I know about tofu, but the process for making that from soy beans must be very similar again to the process of making cheese: you need milk and some kind of acid.

[OzzieCheese]

I've tried Almond cheese from a health food stall at the Eumundi Markets along with a 'Soy Curd' and I'm willing to give most things a go but these were just the worst things I've ever put in my mouth.  The Almond "cheese" - it was really just gritty, sour and bitter. The Soy curd was even worse - snot like... gag!  I feel for any vegan eating them while I'm a big fan of Tofu these vegan 'Cheeses' were amazingly bad. 

-- Mal

[TimT]

"I'm a big fan of Tofu"....

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (Runs in the other direction) 

Um. The recipe I have - it's from the cookbooks of Martha Washington, George Washington's wife - treats it as a sweet and it works really, really well. Nutty, with mild sourness from the lemon, and sweetness from both the lemon and the almonds as well as some added sugar (just dissolve it into the milk before you add lemon).

I suspect where modern recipes often fall down is in trying to come up with a product that imitates other products - ie, an imitation vegan cheese - rather than a product which really shows forth its own special qualities. Some of the nut-based cream cheeses taste alright - they've been lacto-fermented with a culture which helps to give them a cheesy taste - but of course it's still an imitation.

So it's definitely worth trying for yourself as a sweet recipe. Very easy and takes up less time than most cheeses. Last time I did it I gave it a pinch of nutmeg, some lemon peel, and some sprigs of mint on top of the finished cheeses, which I moulded into cakes in the muffin tray. Very nice. though obviously not so nice for people with nut allergies :p

[OzzieCheese]

I'm game.... if you could post you recipe, I'd like to at least try. 

[TimT]

I just checked my notes! So here's a recipe. Note, this makes about 8 little cakes of cheese and we found that some of these got mould a day or so after baking, so you may want to lower the quantities quite a bit:

INGREDIENTS
3 cups almonds
water, (for soaking, day before)
6 - 7 cups of water (to make almond milk)
4 lemons, grated and juiced
3 tablespoons sugar
Spices - pinch of nutmeg, cinnamon, maybe even some currants

METHOD
1. Soak the almonds in water for 24 hours to make them plump up. They'll soak up a good bit of water so cover them up with water and then some.
2. Drain off the remaining water. Throw the almonds in a blender with the 6-7 cups water and give them a good zoom round the room (The less water you use the creamier the milk will be).
3. Pour the whole lot into a pan. Stir in the sugar. Heat until just below boiling point. When the milk is on the cusp of seething, turn the heat off and add the lemon juice and stir in instantly. Let rest for a few minutes.
4. Pour through a cheesecloth. You should capture the curds and the ground almond in the cloth and the way in a pot below. Let this hang for a little while to drain off the whey.
5. Stir the spices, currants, and peel in through the curds and almond grounds. Put them into lightly greased muffin trays and pop them in a oven at low heat for half an hour to help them develop a rind.

Done!

I learned the 'rind' trick from somewhere on the net. It's probably not necessary and I cant recall it making a huge difference to my cakes (maybe a higher heat?) Serve them up with little sprigs of mint to make them look all fine and dandy

[OzzieCheese]

Thanks Tim - I'll have to at least try it once...

-- Mal