A little kitchen chemistry

I've tried nearly every vegan "cheese" available, and they are all horrible.  I did find a shredded rice cheeze that tasted really good!  Yum!  And then the grinding unhappiness from the internal combustion chamber, turns out, it had milk casein in it.  Why anyone would go to the effort to make nearly vegan cheeze but yet add a milk product to it totally escapes me.  There is one that is super tasty and totally safe and in some miraculous fashion tastes nearly the same as Parmesan even though its made with cashews, yeah I dont understand that either, screwy yeah?

Now my desire for edible pizza has been growing the longer I've been marooned on the gluten free, milk free, etc diet.  Most of the gluten free crusts, are just sad.  For the most part they are hard and tasteless.  If a restaurant offers vegan cheeze its always Daiya brand, and while it is the best thats out there I have several issues with it.  One, it has a weird nasty after flavor.  And two I have this issue with eating food with little to no nutrient content, only calories, and somehow this cheeze has little to offer in food value.

While wandering around Amazon a while ago, I came across several books on making vegan cheeze, and bought the one that had the best ratings and hoped for the best.  The first recipe out of the book was a total snooze fest, cheeze sauce.  While I hate to toot my own horn, the one I invented was light years better than the one in the book.  However, I decided to press on and try a cheeze from the book, and the simplest one was mozzarella.  I gathered up the required ingredients, one of which had to be ordered, kappa carrageenan.  "A natural hydrocolloid, carrageenan is a natural extract from specific red seaweed species that are farmed and processed. It is used as a suspending and emulsifying stablizer, thickener, binder and gelling agent."   And was ready to give this a whirl.

It was a bit tiring stirring for nearly 30 minutes of a mixture that became ever more dense and harder to stir, but at long last, it was done.  The cheeze needs to sit in the fridge around 24 hours after making before tasting, the wait was killer long!

Finally!  It was cheeze tasting time. 

                                        HOLY MOTHER OF CHEESE!  

Its mega delicious!  

I tried it out on a friend and after her first tenetive taste, asked for more!  This cheeze is OMG good. Whipping out a gluten free french bread recipe, I conjured up a batch of dough to make pizza.    This would also be my first adventure in GF pizza dough.  It was hard to not keeping cracking open the oven door, I just had to know how things were progressing.  Was the dough looking pizza-ish?  How about the cheeze, was it melting?  Finally after about 9 million hours it was done! 

                                      PIZZA!

Chewy dough, melty globby cheeze, this my friends was a pizza to enjoy.  So much so that two days later I made another one!

I finally hit the pizza wall, and froze the last 4 pieces. 

Last night I melted some of the cheeze into milk with a little vegan butter and some nutritional yeast (to give it a stronger cheese flavor) and made, mac and cheeze!  Yummy!  Soft and gooey, perfect mac and cheese, so good I reheated it and had it for breakfast. 

Next up, I'm going to give the cheddar cheeze recipe a whirl.....  Nachos here I come!