Preface

I have been wanting to write this book for thirty years. That’s not to say that I had a trove of vegan cheese recipes ready to be compiled into a book thirty years ago; back then they were just flickers of ideas floating around my mind. But I knew that one day I would develop some really credible vegan cheeses, and I kept promising people I’d do that. Well, this has been my year of vegan cheeses.

It started sometime in the spring of 2010. I had been intrigued for several years by the nut-based cheeses popular in the raw food community and had been playing around with them. The majority of vegan cheeses I had sampled were more like spreads, requiring a stretch of the imagination to think of them as cheese. But a few were stellar, notably the raw cheeses made by Roxanne Klein at her all-too-ephemeral restaurant, Roxanne’s. Café Gratitude, a chain of vegan restaurants in the Bay Area, also had some winners on their menu. Still, if they were raw, they didn’t melt. There was also, of course, the ever-increasing number of commercially available vegan cheeses that melted to a degree, which had improved in quality and variety over the years, but to my taste buds they still had a somewhat artificial flavor and weren’t up to “cheese board standards.” What to do?