Vegan cheese made from home-grown vegetable oils is healthier, greener and more "oozy”, scientists have found.
The cheese substitute is typically made from a combination of starch and solid fats like coconut or palm oil.
The fats give it the "sliceable, meltable” texture people expect from cheese - but also mean vegan cheese often ends up with a high saturated fat content.
Now a team at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University (HWU) has developed a way of making vegan cheese slices from vegetable oils like rapeseed and sunflower, rather than the coconut and palm oil.
The work is as part of efforts to make the product healthier and more sustainable.
"I think it’s fair to say that when most people try vegan cheese for the first time, they don’t wax lyrical,” Professor Stephen Euston, who is leading the team, said.
"The main reason for that is probably to do with the lack of protein. Normal cheese is mostly protein, whereas vegan cheese has none. It’s mostly starch, with a few colourings and flavourings added, and sometimes a bit of salt.”
The other main ingredient is fat, either coconut or palm oil, Euston explained.
"Solid fats help create the sliceable, meltable texture people expect from cheese. But it means that vegan cheese ends up with a high saturated fat content, often up to 25%, which means it isn’t the healthiest option,” Euston said.
"And consumers are becoming increasingly averse to palm and coconut oil due to the deforestation involved and its impact on wildlife like orangutans.”
The team achieved the feat using a process called oleogelation - which is where special molecules called oleogelators are added to a liquid oil and they assemble into microscopic structures that trap the oil inside a 3D structure.
The result is a gel that behaves like a solid fat.
Prof Euston said the "challenge” is making vegetable oils behave like solid fat, so that the vegan cheese has something resembling the texture of actual cheese.
"We’re very mindful of reducing food miles, so we’re focused on using crops that can be grown sustainably, at scale,” he added.
As well as having a lower saturated fat content, the team found cheese made from vegetable oils was also more "meltable” than several off-the-shelf coconut oil-based alternatives.
"Meltability is one of the biggest complaints about vegan cheese - it’s not very oozy - so improving that feature is an unintended bonus,” Euston said.
"We’ve proved that our recipe, which reduces the saturated fat content of the cheese to as low as 3%, works theoretically and in our lab. But we’ve yet to take it to the kitchen and onto a plate. We’re hoping to do that within the next 10 months, when it will be presented to a tasting panel,” he said.
"It won’t taste any better or worse than the current vegan cheese slices on the market, but it will be more heart healthy and greener.”
The HWU team has received funding from the UK Research and Innovation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to reach a new milestone: moving the cheese from the lab into the kitchen and putting its taste to the test with real people.
Prof Euston’s peer-reviewed work on vegan cheese has been published in the journal, Food Chemistry. – dpa
