Does Daiya Cheese Live Up To the Hype?
In many ways, cheese is the final frontier in vegan foods. Is there a vegan alive who hasn’t heard the old “I’d love to go vegan but I could never give up cheese” line before? It seems like no other processed food has been so difficult to simulate without the animal products.
Meat substitutes moved out of their little niche at natural food stores and have been available in mainstream supermarkets for years. Maggie Mudd, Double Rainbow and several other companies broke the ice cream barrier with soy based ice creams that are easily as good as their dairy counterparts. We vegans have a variety of perfectly acceptable butter substitutes courtesy of Earth Balance. The one animal based product that has eluded the makers of vegan foods has been cheese.
Not that there aren’t plenty of vegan cheeses to choose from. Yes, VeganRella has been around for ages, and Galaxy Foods has been making vegan cheese slices that have a taste and texture reminiscent of chewable plastic for years as well. When Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet cheeses appeared several years ago, many vegans proclaimed a new era in vegan cheeses, but they were hardly an improvement over their predecessors. Similar claims were made when Chicago Soy Dairy introduced Teese last year. While Teese actually melted when heated, it had a strange texture and a funky aftertaste similar to so many other vegan cheeses. To make things worse, melted Teese congealed into an unappealing lump, also reminiscent of plastic, after a minute or two at room temperature. Sheese and Cheezly also entered the picture in recent years and fared a little better than the others. (More on Cheezely in a moment).
For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the last six months, word on the streets is that the vegan cheese game has changed. Ever since the introduction of Daiya dairy free cheese this past March at the Natural Products Expo West, the surrounding buzz has been building to a deafening roar in vegan blogs and publications. For several months, Daiya has been shipping their cheese to restaurants, and now it is just beginning to appear in stores like Food Fight, Pangea, and Rainbow Grocery. So is it the game changer that so many are claiming it to be?
Daiya: Gooey vegan meltiness
Without a doubt, Daiya melts more like dairy cheese than any of the other vegan cheeses I’ve tried. The texture when melted is pleasantly gooey (that’s the technical term in case you were wondering) and unlike many other vegan cheeses, Daiya doesn’t congeal into a hardened lump when it starts cooling down. In other good news, there’s no weird aftertaste with Daiya. That said, it’s not a dead ringer for dairy mozzarella. Yes, it’s a close approximation. Close enough that not all of the pizza I bake will be cheeseless in the future, however anyone used to eating dairy cheese will probably find something amiss.
I would venture to say that Cheezely mozzarella comes closer to the taste of dairy mozzarella than Daiya, although Cheezely doesn’t match Daiya’s meltiness (another technical term for those who are counting). Which one makes the better pizza? I can’t say yet, but in the near future I’ll be conducting a side by side test. What I can say is that the pizza made with Daiya is the closest I’ve come to the pizza I used to eat back in my dairy eating days.
So does Daiya live up to all of the hype? There’s no question that it’s a big step forward in the evolution of vegan cheese, but I don’t know that it will pass the ultimate test. The ultimate test of any vegan dairy or meat substitute is to serve it to meat and dairy eaters. If said meat and dairy eaters can’t tell it’s vegan, then the product is a winner. We’ll be putting Daiya through many tests in the near future, including the ultimate test, and will be posting the results.
Thanks for the review. I’ve been very curious about this stuff. (I, too, prefer going “cheeseless” to subs.) Where does one purchase/order Daiya?
Hi Nikki,
Right now Daiya is selling primarily to restaurants and other food service companies, but it’s slowly making it into stores. The closest place to Redmond that I know of is Food Fight Grocery in Portland. I’ve seen reports that it started to appear in some Whole Foods in SoCal, so maybe it’ll make its way up north and cross the border to the Bend Whole Foods. You can find the full list at http://daiyafoods.com/where.html.
SB
You can buy Daiya at http://www.veganstore.com for $5 per 8 oz bag, but you need to buy a “freezy pack” for shipping and pay for faster shipping, which adds more to your total. Sidecar for Pigs for Peace, an all-vegan grocery store in Seattle, sells Daiya on the shelf.
Just tried daiya for the first time at “pie” in st louis OBSESSED where can I get this
Been vegan for 35 yrs. Don’t miss cheese at all. Wouldn’t by this stuff. Too expensive just to satisfy my taste buds. If you’re vegan for a few yrs. you shouldn’t be craving any of this rip-off processed junk food.
I completely see were Vinny Manzo is coming from, and as a vegan I think that I should be cutting the knock offs as much as I can too.
Anyways, onto this topic. Daiya cheese is amazing. I had it in a Philly steak sandwich at Spiral in Forth Worth and absolutely loved it. I exchanged some emails with the company last week and they said it would be available in Whole Foods stores at the end of this month. It’s better than anything I have ever tried.
I disagree that the best vegan cheese is the one that tastes most like dairy. First off, I used to be one of those people who said that I could never go vegan because I love cheese. I did it, though, and never looked back. If someone wants to go vegan, they will despite taste barriers-usually that’s just an excuse.
Second, I could write you a novel about all the foods I hated as an omnivore yet adore the vegan versions. Mayonnaise, chicken nuggets… the list goes on. I couldn’t tell you why. Wanting what I can’t have, or knowing the food is free of unidentified animal parts and the least healthy ingredients, maybe. But I think that at least in some cases, the vegan alternative tastes BETTER. And I already like Daiya pizza more than I ever liked cheese pizza, even though I did like it and miss it.
Finally, I don’t think we should be moving towards that goal because it involves chemicals and unnatural processes. To get a food to taste exactly like animal flesh or milk, you can’t just put vegetables and herbs in a food processor. If we want people to be healthier, we should show them how enjoyable these alternatives can be, and even tastier than animal products, EVEN if they don’t taste exactly the same. Why try to “fool” them, why not just ask them if it tastes good?
Wow, that was long. I don’t know, it has always bothered me when people want something that tastes exactly like animal products, because I go by taste pleasantness alone and, all ethical concerns aside, there are a lot of vegan alternatives I prefer to the “original” foods.
I am not vegan and never will be, but I am allergic to milk and soy and gluten. I love Daiya, it has been an answer to my prayers. I went 5 years without cheese of any kind since rice cheese is icky and I am allergic to soy cheese. I made cheese out of nutritional yeast, but it doesn’t really compare. I am so much happier cooking when I can use Daiya. In recipes you can’t really tell that it is vegan. You only notice a difference when it is the main feature like on Pizza. It is really good for lasagna and mac and cheese and grilled cheese(on Udis bread) and on nachos and etc. This isn’t really junk food in my opinion though because there aren’t any mystery ingredients and the processing seems pretty minimal to me. It is even cultured like real cheese and mixing the cheddar and Italian blends together, it tastes even better. I have to hide the stuff from my kids because they will sit and eat the whole bag if I let them. In fact my son who has no food allergies prefers it to real cheese. That might be because I have never kept cheese around my house for his entire life, so to him Daiya is cheese and dairy cheese tastes off to him. As far as price, it is a little on the expensive side, especially since it is not locally available so I have to have it shipped, luckily I live close enough to an online retailer that I don’t have to pay for air shipping, just the cooler pack and ground shipping. If I happen to be in the area I will stop by their store and by some in person, but for now I buy in 5lb bulk bags and have it shipped. I divide it into 1 lb packages and freeze 4 of the 5 and take some more out of the freezer as I need it. It is about $40 for 5 lbs plus $6 for the cooler and $10 for shipping. So it about $11 a lb and artisan organic cheese costs more than that.
Ingredients look ok except for coconut oil which for health and cholesterol minded folks is a “no-no”.
[...] buzz surrounding Daiya has been through the roof following its introduction last March. The general consensus among reviewers is that it looks, tastes and, more importantly, melts just like real cheese. It [...]