But give me ooey, gooey, and creamy sauce with vegan cheeses over those vegetable purée pastas,” she says. Lisa Le, a vegan blogger, told me she generally avoided this method unless she wanted baked cheesy vegetable pasta. Rather, they tasted exactly like what they were: Pasta cooked and coated in a puréed sauce of vegetables or beans. Ultimately, they didn’t mimic the taste or texture of macaroni and cheese. The high starch content of these puréed vegetables created silky and thick sauces, but they lacked the fatty richness and umami proteins of a dairy-based cheese sauce. While each recipe was tasty, none of them offered exactly what I was looking for.
Easy vegan mac and cheese without cashew or potato carrot mac#
In each of those recipes, vegetables and/or beans were puréed with nutritional yeast to make a starchy, cheesy-tasting base to replicate the thick, luscious bechamel that typically underpins classic stovetop mac and cheese. I cooked one with carrots and potatoes, a second one with butternut squash, and a third version with cauliflower and white beans. The first mac and cheese recipes I tested were made with vegetable or bean purées. I wanted something that’d be good enough to serve at Thanksgiving. While I haven’t solved the lasagna problem just yet, I decided to dedicate my early months at Epicurious to searching for the best vegan mac and cheese recipe: a formula for vegan macaroni and cheese that’d be creamy, comforting, and satisfying.
These days, I’m more of a flexitarian who maintains a predominantly plant-based diet-but I’ve never given up the search for that elusive vegan cheese that actually satisfies my cravings. When I enrolled in culinary school and began cooking professionally, it became extremely difficult to remain vegan. I eventually accepted that this was the price I had to pay as a vegan. Lasagnas were never quite as melty as I wanted them to be, and vegan ricotta always felt chalky on my palate. The soft burst of creamy burrata on salads, the tang of a sharp cheddar, and the briny freshness of feta-nothing I found in the dairy-free cheese section during those years could truly compare to the richness of cheese made from dairy.
Like many vegans, I felt strongly about the cause-but still sorely missed cheese. During my time as a Greenpeace activist in college, I was introduced to Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, and the conversations and experiences I had convinced me to give up animal products for ethical environmental reasons. I used to be a strict vegan, and the one animal-based product I missed the most was cheese.
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