The Vegan Creamery

Introduction: My Story

If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, I hope this is the book that launches a thousand vegan creameries around the world, each serving its own community. Even more, I hope this book inspires people in home kitchens everywhere to discover the magic that lies in plant milks.

Many have generously given my first book, Artisan Vegan Cheese, the credit for lighting the way for many to explore the subject, and in truth, there are vegan cheesemongers the world over who took their inspiration from my book. I have visited some of them in far-flung places, such as Budapest, London, Genoa, Rome, and Kyoto, and have delighted in meeting them and tasting their creations. Initially, I thought I’d just do a revised edition of that book, but as I leafed through my own cashew milk–stained copy, I realized that in just over a decade from when I wrote it, my understanding of the science and artistry of plant-milk dairy had evolved so much that it needed a total rewrite.

We are still in the nascency of this exploration. Whereas humankind has had thousands of years to explore the functionality of animal milks, our knowledge of what’s possible with plant milks is very, very limited. This is especially true for cheese, often considered the last frontier. For these reasons, this is likely the hardest book I have ever written, and I still feel that I’m midstream in recipe development. But I am hoping it will inspire others to forge on.

My goal is to ignite passion in people to dig deeper, explore further, become more curious about the things we could do with various plant milks, to understand how their proteins, fats, and other nutrients function and react in different combinations and environments. While this book contains some methodologies that I believe are new, it is by no means the treatise on everything plant dairy. After all, I, too, am just an early explorer, trying to understand as much as I can. But what I have come to understand, I want to share with everyone. If we are to change the food system and find more compassionate ways to produce traditional foods without animal milk, then we need to make the information available to as many people as possible and not hoard it for ourselves or our companies.

Before we plunge further into the ins and outs of plant milk, I’d like to meander down, shall we say, “memory lane,” and explain why it was unlikely that a Japanese woman born in a country at a time when dairy products were practically nonexistent would have become obsessed with all things cheese and butter, even earning the unofficial title of Queen of Vegan Cheese and Butter. I began my life in the land of rice and soy sauce—oh, and natto, those stinky, stretchy, fermented soybeans only people from the Kanto area (where Tokyo and Yokohama are located) would eat. I was a natto-girl all the way, devouring them on a hot bowl of rice for breakfast. Perhaps it was my taste for natto that prepared me for the stinkiest, strongest cheeses later in life.

When I was seven, we moved to a sleepy town in Northern California (not so sleepy now), from an even sleepier village in Japan. Everything I saw in Mill Valley was exotic and somehow beautiful. My mom and I would walk down to Bill’s corner store across the street from my elementary school, and she’d treat me to Pixy Stix, those straws with the colorful sugary powder in them that would tingle in your mouth— pure magic. I would stare at blue-eyed, blond children—I was convinced they were made from angel dust. I, on the other hand, with my black hair and flat face, had been made of, well, natto.

I wanted so badly to be just like those golden kids. I thought I’d have my chance the first time I had pizza at a party I’d been invited to—one bite, I thought, and I’d be transformed. And there it was: a giant round thing glistening in oil. There’s an expression in Japan to describe how Westerners smell—bata-kusai, or “stinks of butter.” (Likewise, there’s an equivalent expression to describe the smell of Japanese—shoyu-kusai—or “stinks of soy sauce.”) As I watched the kids grabbing slice after slice, I stood there, repulsed by its pungent smell. But I bravely approached the table and hesitantly took a bite. The oil dripped down my mouth and coated my throat. I gagged. I didn’t understand—how could anyone like something so disgusting? I thought. The worst part was that I didn’t even go blond.

Fast-forward to high school. I had moved beyond onigiri and umeboshi and somehow, after that first horrible pizza experience, had become obsessed with cheese. This was the 1970s, and while most of my friends stuck to cheddar, Monterey Jack, and Swiss, or worse—American cheese—I had become a full-blown cheese adventurer, perhaps even a snob, snickering at the Velveeta in the fridges of my friends. Thanks to my dad, a white man born in Charlotte, raised in Kansas City, then shipped off in high school to live with his aunt in her hotel in Santa Cruz, my fridge at home was filled with the likes of Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, and even Limburger, the unabashedly stinky cheese that repulsed all of my friends.

My dad and I would sometimes drive to the Marin French Cheese Company in West Marin, the oldest cheese company in America. Tucked away in the pastoral countryside, the place seemed so remote at the time but is literally 5 minutes from where I live now. We’d stock up on their lovely bloomy rind cheeses, packed traditionally in round wooden boxes with their Rouge et Noir logo.

I went on to college, where I started hosting wine and cheese parties in my dorm room on Friday nights, procuring as many exotic cheeses as I could from the one and only specialty food shop in town. After sophomore year, a girlfriend and I decided to take a gap year and backpack around Europe for a few months. This was where the real awakening took place. I remember arriving in Paris and stumbling into my first cheese shop. My memory paints a picture of walls covered with shelves to the ceiling, filled with cheeses of every variety—I realize now that it wouldn’t have been possible, since they would have had to have been refrigerated. But that is the indelible, if factually incorrect, memory I’ve held on to. In this paradise of fromage, I didn’t even know where to start. I had never seen most of them. We filled our basket with cheeses of various shapes and textures, some hard, some seemingly oozing out of their film. Then off we went to a grassy pitch by the side of a road to unwrap our treasures and eat them with chunks of Parisian baguette, washing it all down with a bottle of cheap red wine. Ahh—what more could I ask for? To me, that moment embodied the Good Life. I mean, what else was there?

Over the next six months, from England down to Greece, we sought out cheese in every corner of Europe. What struck me profoundly then was something that amazes me to this day: the simple fact that the thousands of varieties of cheese all over the world are based on one ingredient—milk, whether from a cow, goat, or sheep (and sometimes from even more exotic animals, such as camels or even humans). To the milk are added enzymes and bacteria, and sometimes yeasts and molds, and then nature does its thing, transforming, through chemical and biological reactions, liquid milk into cheese.

Beyond the types of bacteria, yeast, or mold added to the milk, there are even environmental considerations, such as temperature and humidity to consider, as well as whether there are other things in the environment, such as Penicillium roqueforti, perhaps floating around the air from some moldy bread. Then there is the matter of the nutritional makeup of the milk itself: What is the fat content of the milk? Were the cows milked in the winter or summer? All of these variables play a part in the outcome of the cheese.

Cheese is an evolutionary science that has gone on in the rustic “kitchen labs” of farmhouses and homes of everyday people for thousands of years. It is also an art form that people have perfected after observing what nature can do to milk, a living craft that requires constant attention. The head cheesemaker at Cowgirl Creamery told me once how cheese was “alive,” and therefore needed daily monitoring. It isn’t just a recipe or formula you follow; the temperature, humidity, the fat and protein content of the milk—all of this can alter the “recipe.” Master cheesemakers know how to make adjustments to achieve similar results each time because it is an art form as well as a science.