A Good(!) Vegan Cheese Plate
With a growing number of people interested in eating plant-based foods, more varieties of vegan cheese are emerging than ever before. We thought it was time to take a closer look at one especially exciting emerging category: vegan cheeses that would be appropriate for serving plain, on a vegan cheese plate. So we tasted nine of the most well-regarded products, including Brie-style, blue cheese–style, and spreadable vegan cheeses.
Textures ran the gamut from smooth and spreadable to firm and relatively dry, though many of our favorite cheeses leaned toward the creamy side. We generally preferred cheeses with shorter ingredient lists. Cheeses that included onion powder, mustard powder, or other “natural flavors” were either dominated by these flavors or head-scratchingly insipid. Most cheeses were pleasantly tangy and tasted to varying degrees like the cashews from which they were made. (A little nuttiness was fine, though we didn’t love cheeses where cashew was the only thing we tasted.)
In the end, we
