Food Friday: (Quick) and Easy Aquafaba Mozzarella

If you are trying to be vegan and you love cheese, AND you don't want to buy highly processed fake cheeses, then you need to make your own.  In the past I think I shared one or more failures along this line.  Today I have a success.  Sort of.  I found the recipe at Avocadoes and Ales.

This recipe really works.  You really do have a tasty cheese-like food.  The only glitch is the percentage of fat.  I suppose one should be happy that this is plant fat, but still, it is fat.

Here is the recipe I used to make the cheese in the pictures.

1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked in water overnight in the refrigerator
2 cups aquafaba (the water that you cook garbanzo beans in...though you don't have to cook your own.  Just open a can or two of garbanzos from the store and use that water.)
4 Tablespoons tapioca flour
4 teaspoons kappa carrageenan
4 Tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons nutritional yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt
2/3 cup REFINED coconut oil, melted . (use the refined to avoid coconut flavored cheese)

Blend the soft cashews and aquafaba in a high speed blender.  If you use a less high speed blender you will have to blend longer then strain the slurry through a fine-mesh strainer.  You do not want chunks of cashews in your cheese.

Aquafaba drained off the garbanzo beans.

Garbanzo beans cooked in Instant Pot.  I cooked them an hour because I DO NOT LIKE garbanzos that are even slightly firm.  These are perfect for my taste.  Now, on to hummus...

Put the wet back into the blender along with the tapioca flour, carrageenan, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, and salt.  Pulse to combine everything fully.  I did not pulse.  I just turned on the blender.  When I was done, there was still a few dry clumps of the tapioca flour on the side of the blender...so I scraped it down and blended again.

Add the melted and cooled coconut oil and blend again briefly until smooth and slightly thick.

Put this mixture into a heavy-bottomed sauce pan over medium low heat and start stirring. It takes quite a while.  The recipe I used said you had to get the mixture up to 170 degrees F which you would recognize by the bubbles around the edges.  At this point it should be uniformly thick and remain thick when you run the wooden spoon through the food.  For me, I stopped stirring at 20 minutes.  I was sick of stirring.  The mixture was sort of glossy and thick but it never bubbled around the edges.

At this point pour it into a mold of some type. I used a glass bowl then smoothed the top.

Put into the refrigerator to cool for several hours.  You can slice this, and theoretically, grate it, but we did not get that far.  We used it on mustard and "cheese" sandwiches, between fresh tomato slices (good, but would have been better with garden fresh tomatoes, field grown, and local...not commercially grown greenhouse tomatoes), and finally, we used it in lasagna.  Dear One ate lasagna two nights in a row with NO complaints about leftovers...that says something!

So, I would call this a success.  It did work.  Was not a pain to make, except for the stirring, and it tastes good.  Unfortunately, I have made a semi-commitment to knock off the fat consumption so it will be some little time before I make it again.  Sad.