It looks like cheese, it melts like cheese, it even stretches like cheese. But it’s not cheese. At least not a cheese made from milk.
Researchers from the Department of Food Sciences at the University of Guelph, Ontario. have been working on a “cheese analog”, a non-dairy cheese, which they believe is more nutritious and better suited for a variety of culinary applications than many non-dairy cheese products currently on the market.
“This is a new plant-based cheese. Many other products don’t stretch or melt, or have [milk-based cheese’s] high nutritional value. We’re using the fundamental knowledge we have about plant protein ingredients to create something that has the desired texture and taste,” said researcher Stacie Dobson, a doctoral student in food science at the university.
For several years, Dobson has been creating plant-based cheese iterations and testing them on foods like grilled sandwiches, striving to perfect the recipe.
Alejandro Marangoni, Canada Research Chair and professor of food, health and aging in Guelph’s department of food sciences, advises Dobson on his research.
“The work that Dobson and the rest of us are doing here in the lab is to improve the nutritional properties, increase the protein content, increase the micronutrient content and improve the functionality of the product,” Marangoni said.
Plant-Based Cheese Building Blocks
The team uses familiar kitchen tools such as a hot plate, spatula, cutting board, and knife. But there’s also a “texture analyzer,” a machine that mimics chewing and provides data on properties like hardness, chewiness and elasticity. Dobson’s main ingredients are vegetable protein, starch, coconut oil, salt, lactic acid and water.
“Most of the foods you eat are proteins, starches, carbohydrates and fats. Those ingredients, depending on how we mix them, are the same building blocks that we use to make plant-based cheese,” Dobson said.
Understanding the intrinsic qualities of ingredients allows Dobson to create recipes that meet the needs of various culinary applications – the “cheese” functionality.
“With food science, we can change the properties of the cheese. I can make it have a drier texture similar to Parmesan instead of one that you want to be sticky like mozzarella or something like a slice of cheese,” he said.
grilled cheese test
On the lab bench are half a dozen labeled bags containing pieces of shredded white “cheese” that look like what you might find in a grocery store dairy box.
Dobson turns on the hot plate and prepares a frying pan; she spreads margarine on slices of German sourdough bread, loads some plant-based cheese on the bottom slice, and tops it with another slice of bread. She then places the experimental sandwich in the pan.
In about the same time it would take anyone to make a grilled cheese sandwich at home, Dobson has flipped the cheese lab sourdough sandwich a couple of times and cooked it until golden brown.
Chunks of cheese that have hit the hot skillet melt and then crisp up, like the “cheese skirt” of any melted cheeseburger or sandwich that has been cooked on a flat grill.
When the bread slices are tentatively pulled apart, strings of cheese spread between the two slices. Acting like dairy cheese when cooked is the latest laboratory breakthrough.
Next step: production at the retail level
Among the current plant-based cheeses in your neighborhood grocery store are products from Daiya, a Vancouver-based dairy-free food maker, and a partial funder of Dobson and Marangoni research. The company will use technology from the University of Guelph and scientific advances in plant-based food manufacturing.
“The next steps are to start scaling [for manufacture] of the product and hopes to reach production at the retail level,” says Dobson.
environmental motivator
Creating a delicious plant-based cheese is first and foremost for the lab; however, reducing the impact that food production has on the environment comes a close second, according to Marangoni.
“We live in very critical times in our world right now. One of our main motivations is to improve the sustainability of our food supply. We are not here to replace animal products with plant-based products, but to create a variety in which we lessen our impact just because there are so many humans in the world,” he said.
Marangoni, citing the latest Good Food Institute report, says demand for animal products will reach 400 million tons by 2030.
“We will be close to replacing only six percent [of that]. It is a gigantic transition that would have to happen. We need to produce huge amounts of plant protein and starches and build factories that can produce these products,” he said.
But does it taste like cheese?
When I took a bite, the Dobson’s Grilled “Cheese” Sandwich was crispy on the outside and creamy and gooey on the inside with warm cheese that was “stretched”.
You wouldn’t have been able to tell it was a plant-based product, and as Marangoni adds, you’re also getting less fat in your diet.
Can this cheese analog, still in development in the lab, replace a nice chunk of Beemster or a creamy Havarti? Well, it’s not actually designed or intended to do that, the researchers say.
“For me, this cheese analog gets there. It doesn’t exactly mimic a dairy product, but for most industrial applications,” he said, like in cooked products or even retail burgers or grilled sandwiches, “I think you’d have is really difficult to distinguish our product of vegetable origin from that of animal origin”.
