Cashew Cheddar

I made another round of cashew cheese, this time with a cheddar like flavor, which I've creatively named "Cashew Cheddar"!

Later that day the cashew was walking down the street with his friend the peanut, and one of them was assaulted. Ha!

The process for this is very similar to the Cashew Chevre, but with a few different ingredients and an added cooking step to make the cheese thicker (ohhhh exciting) .  Breaking the recipe down you have two steps: Step 1: Ferment, and Step 2: Thicken, both of which I will cover in fuzzy details on because I forgot to take notes and don't have my book with me. Best blog ever!

Also, after explaining what was in this to a co-worker, I realized that many people might not know what all of these ingredients are. So I'll try to explain some of the ones that people may not be too familiar with. I don't like to use anything I would consider unnatural or unhealthy, but everybody has their own definition of what those words mean, so I'll just tell you what they are and you can form your own opinion.

Miso paste, nutritional yeast flakes, salt, and cashews in the blender.

Step 1: Ferment
Ingredients 
- 1/2 cup Rejuvelac (I had plenty left over from making Cashew Chevere)
- 2 cups Raw Cashews, soaked in water for half a day and then drained
- 2/3 cup Nutritional Yeast
- 2 tbsp Miso (I used a brown rice miso, but you can use whatever you have)
- 1 tsp Salt


Confusing Ingredient Definitions
Nutritional Yeast is a yeast that is grown on molasses during its production, which they harvest, clean, and then heat it to kill it so its no longer active. So you can't bake bread or brew beer with it, but you can add it to things to give it a cheesy flavor which can come in handy if you don't eat cheese.

Miso is a paste made of beans, salt, and a healthy fungus called koji thats typically grown on rice.  Most miso is made with soy beans, which is what I used for this, but if your alergic to soy or are one of those people just plain don't trust it (soy beans and politicians, just one in the same!) you can find chickpea and even black bean miso's pretty easily. Miso also adds a cheese like flavor to things. How convenient!

Take all of the ingredients listed above and blend them together until smooth.  Then put it in a bowl, cover tightly, and let it ferment for 1-3 days.  The longer you go, the sharper the flavor, so I decided to ferment it for a full 3 days.

You could refrigerate and eat it now as a spreadable cheddar and the flavor would be just the same.

Step 2: Thicken
Ingredients
- Cashew Cheddar (from step 1)
- 1 tsp (I think) Xanthan Gum
- 2 tbsp Agar Powder (I used flakes.  More on that below)

Confusing Ingredient Definitions
Xanthan Gum is string of sugars (polysaccharide for you fancy folks in the audience) that's produced when the bacteria Xanthomonas campestris ferments a sugar. That string of sugars it produces is a gel that gets dried and then milled into a powder.  

Agar is another string of sugars (polysaccharide again) that forms a gel which is dried and milled, but this time its produced by an algae.  

Both of these sound like something Walter White might have used in his lab, but all they are used for is thickening agents to make the cheese slice-able.

"Walt, this is the thickest meth I've ever had! Are you sure there's no animal ingredients in it?"

Mix the Xanthan Gum and Agar Powder with the fermented cashew cheddar, and then stir over medium heat on the stove until everything is combined and the cheese gets glossy and pulls from the side of the pot easily (about 5 minutes).

I didn't have Agar Powder, but I did have was Agar flakes. Having never used Agar before, I assumed I could just grind those flakes into a powder with a mortar and pestle and be on my way. Unfortunately, Agar flakes still have a gel like quality to them and annoyingly retained its shape as I spent 5 minutes angrily moving them around in the little stone bowl.

This concerned me a little because the point of the agar powder was to evenly disperse through the cheese so that it could thicken, and now I was just going to have giant flakes randomly throughout the cheese that probably wouldn't work as well. But I had come this far, so I kept moving forward.

 After mixing the ingredients together and heating it on the stove, I poured it into a glass dish and put it in the fridge to set up.

My wooden spoon has an elephant on top of it, and that's what makes it so grand!

I made two mistakes with this cheese.  The first was the agar flakes, which may have helped thicken the cheese a little but certainty didn't make it slice-able. The second was putting the cheese into a container without cheese cloth or plastic wrap underneath, which made it impossible to remove it from the container so I could take a pretty picture of it. Seriously, I took a picture of it for the blog and my wife said "that makes it look horrible," I took her feedback into consideration and then promptly disregarded it and put the picture on here anyway.

Probably should have listened to her.

But none of this mattered, because it came out awesome! It tasted like cheddar cheese, more so than any store bought vegan cheddar I've had, and more importantly it tasted delicious! It was awesome on crackers, is rumored to be great when its melted for mac and cheese, and I've even heard its fantastic when eaten off of a plate with your bare hands while hiding in a dark and empty room so nobody sees your shame (again, that's just something heard).

It was such a hit I'm making it again for Christmas Eve.  And this time I might even share it with people.....or I'll just turn the lights on in the empty room, I haven't decided. But either way it will make for a happy holiday.

Cheers!