Introduction

Welcome welcome wonderful listener. It is you that keeps me recording these podcasts. So thank you for being here.

I often am told by people that they couldn’t be vegan because they could never give up dairy. It really is a difficult one. It is a journey I struggled with for 29 years. Being vegetarian for 29 years was wonderful, but over the years, I could see how much dairy I was consuming. When I think back to my childhood. We had 300ml 5x a week in the form of an iced coffee. When we ate cereal, we had about ½ cup of milk. I mostly ate toast though and we didn’t have butter. We had 3 slices of cheese on our sandwiches for lunch and that was it. 

Before I gave up dairy, I found myself having fetta cheese every lunch time, and then there would be cheese of some sort in the evening meal too. Luckily I didn’t have any milk or cream. And in addition, if I was feeling out of sorts, I would be chowing down on thick slices of cheddar. Too much, too much. People tell me all the time, they don’t eat much dairy, but when they start listing what they eat, they say they get 1 litre of milk, 250g cheddar, 1 jar of goat's cheese and a block of butter every week. That is a lot of dairy for one person. We would get through 250g of cheddar a week in our family of 4. Dairy consumption for the average person has gone up, yet so many people are being told they should avoid eating dairy.

These podcasts I have recorded are not to try to convince you to give up dairy. Instead, I am recording them to offer you alternatives if you want to reduce your dairy consumption, or have been told you can’t eat it anymore.

I don’t believe in giving anything up. I think replacing it is the way to go. Once you start replacing something you no longer want to eat with a great alternative, you stop craving the food you have replaced.

Once you start using the alternatives regularly, you will find yourself reaching for less dairy.

I asked the people on my mailing list (are you on my mailing list by the way, if not you can sign up with the link in the notes)  – I asked them a few weeks back, what meals they would miss if they had to give up dairy.

I received great answers and am sharing those meals and my ideas on how I would substitute dairy to make the meal taste sensational.

Pre packaged dairy alternatives 

A few people said they could never give up dairy, as the dairy alternatives are packed full of junk, due to being processed.  I imagine that was the case some time back but I did a look around for butter – and I am definitely not an advocate for butter, it has the most saturated fat of all dairy. I would suggest steering away from margarines and Nuttelex – they certainly are chemical-laden. 

However, in Australia, and I am sure in many parts of the world, there are people making ethical vegan butters. In Australia there is Botanical Cuisine – they do a fermented butter, and Naturli can also be found here, which comes from Scandanavia.

If you want to make your own vegan butter, take a look on line for a recipe or email me and I will send you my recipe. Vegan butter usually contains coconut oil which does have slightly more saturated fat than dairy butter. However, the coconut oil is not the whole content of the vegan butter, so per teaspoon of butter you have on your toast you will be getting less saturated fat.

For an even healthier alternative to butter for toast you could use avocado or tahini, or a nut butter instead, or just have it dry, which I often do. I will put my tempeh, tomato and salad straight on my toast and it is divine. 

For frying with butter you can use oil, there is nothing more tasty or finer that cooking risotto, goulash or paella with olive oil.

And then lets look at another pre-packaged dairy alternative 

Cheese 

If you buy a local vegan artisan cheese, like we have here in our area – ours is called Delictico – that has no preservatives in it, nor does Artisa, and nor does the one you get from supermarkets – bio cheese – I am surprised by this as we sometimes get this one and I always thought I was being super bad by eating it, but it actually does not have any preservatives in it. It has natural flavours.

Substitutes for meals that usually have dairy 

Italian 

Parmesan – this is another hard one. When I think about how much Romano cheese we used to devour on our pasta I shudder. Since giving up dairy we substituted parmesan with what we call sparkle. It is the pepita sprinkle recipe in episode 3. This recipe was first adapted by Tenzin and Ems when they were doing the vegan chef training.  

We toast a cup of pepitas in a dry frying pan until they pop, then let them cool down and then process them with 1 tsp of garlic powder, 1 tsp salt and ½ cup nutritional yeast.

The most common parmesan substitute is made with cashews for the colour, and my good friend Monica put Italian herbs in hers too.

In this week’s recipe, I share with you my all-time favourite parmesan sub, and that is Brazil nut parmesan – it really packs a lot in the umami department.

If you are not sure what umami is, take a listen to podcast 19. I mention it over there.

Another sprinkle I really do love comes from the macrobiotic diet, which we cover in the vegan chef training. It is gomasio and is sensationally simple and good. Just 1 cup sesame seeds toasted until they brown, then cooled down and put in the food processor, with 1 tsp salt, or you can add more salt to taste. The graduate chefs in 2016 actually added some nutritional yeast to it, and that was incredible.

If you are not sure what nutritional yeast is, here is my explanation. It is grown similar to a mushroom on a source which is usually molasses, it is then heated so any active yeast is killed, then fortified with vitamin B12 and dried. It has a somewhat cheesy flavour. 

So for pasta

minestrone soup

lasagne 

and pesto you can add one of the above parmesans I mentioned.

For pesto, I was taught by a Calabrian how to make it. They didn’t use cheese in their pesto, and it was super tasty.

For Pizza. Now this is a big one for many. You definitely can add some bio vegan cheese to the top of any pizza, or think differently about pizza. When I make a pizza, I put dollops of the fermented cashew cheese on the top – as long as a pizza has something saucy on it, it is always going to be delicious.   Go to podcast 15 for that recipe.

Creamed rice 

Creamed rice or rice pudding. You can use any plant milk, and it is going to be delicious. You can also use coconut milk for a more Asian inspired rice pudding. I served rice pudding to thousands of people when I was catering and everyone loved it, there was never any left – you can check out the recipe here. 

Icecream

There are some wonderful alternatives out now. Even Ben and Jerry’s have a vegan range. Then there are local vegan ice cream makers. In our area, there are Aya and Knox.  Or you can make a healthier fruit version by blending or putting frozen fruit through your juicer.

Blue vein 

Delictico and Artisa make incredible blue vein alternatives. 

Cheese cake 

For cheesecakes you can use cashews, also for baked cheese cakes.

Easy snacks 

This is a big one, as grabbing a cracker and cheese is an easy snack.

However, you can always grab a piece of fruit or make the cream cheese in podcast #15 and have cashew or sunflower cheese on a cracker. Or have peanut or almond butter on a celery stick.

Or grab a handful or nuts or seeds.

Melted over cheese on casseroles 

I personally don’t worry about melted cheese, but use the parmesan sprinkles I mentioned above.

For a creamy sauce I use the cauliflower bechamel that I use in the lasagne. This sauce you can use for any cheesy bakes, shepherd's pie, cauliflower cheese and moussaka . 

Milk in tea and coffee. 

Many people choose oat milk, as it is closest in the cream factor to dairy milk. However, you want to avoid too much of it because oat milk does break down to maltose, which is quite high in sugar. But if you are having a dash of it twice a day then there is no problem.

My choice of milk in tea used to be soy milk, or I would take it black. These days, I only drink herbal tea. That has been a natural progression.

Cheese in quesadillas 

You can use shop bought vegan meltable cheese, or you can look up a meltable vegan cheese recipe online, or you can do what I do and what most people in Mexico do  

- don’t actually use any cheese at all .

When you add beans, guacamole and cashew sour cream (recipe in podcast 29).

Greek pie fetta and ricotta 

This is an easy one as you can make a wonderful vegan ricotta with tofu. Firm tofu, lemon juice, nutritional yeast and salt. It is so good.  And if you are wanting to replicate fetta, you just add more salt. Super easy.

Crunchy cheese 

I don’t know if you can replicate crunchy cheese, but you can find other things that are crunchy. Like in the sauerkraut club, we made ‘beetroot pastrami‘. I let some of the pieces get really crunchy and they were divine. Or when I make Greek potatoes, they go super crunchy, or Pandora in podcast 28 mentioned her cashew cheese goes crunchy when she cooks her stuffed mushrooms.

Cheese and tomato toasties 

Once again, you can buy shop bought cheese – my pick is the bio cheese. However, I don’t put cheese in my toasties anymore. I put hummus in and they are the bomb. Much nicer than I remember cheese being.  Thinking outside the box is definitely needed sometimes when replacing cheese.

Mac and Cheese 

I have a sensational mac and cheese recipe that the fabulous Paula, who is presently completing the vegan chef training developed. It is healthier and packs the flavour punch. Here is the recipe. 

Potato Bake 

In my cook book, I have a delicious potato bake. Well, it’s a root vegetable bake recipe, and I use cashews, but you can definitely make it with sunflower seeds or even just soy milk.  It is very good. Give it a whrl.  You can buy my cookbook here.

Butter on hot potatoes or for mash

Vegan butter, we make this in the vegan foundation cooking course. It is super delicious. Or you can buy Nataruli, or Mikiko’s or Botanical Cuisine.  I actually prefer to use soy milk and olive oil, that has a fabulous creamy taste and I know this is going to be a bit strange but putting carrot in mashed potato makes it super creamy too.

This is the same for cooking, you can always use the vegan butters or just use olive oil, so deliciously creamy and someone said they use butter for risotto, but to be honest in all the risotto recipes I have seen, I have never seen one that uses butter, always olive oil.

Cream cheese for carrot cake 

Cashew cream cheese for carrot cake is amazing and that recipe is also in my cook book.

Cream on fruit salad or yoghurt

I just use coconut cream, even on scones this is amazing for me. It may not be the same, but after a while you will definitely get used to it.

This week’s recipe

Brazil nut parmesan

1 cup brazil nuts 

¼ cup nutritional yeast 

¼ tsp turmeric 

½ tsp smoked paprika 

1 ½ tbsp white or light coloured miso

½ tsp salt to taste

Parmesan Method

1. Place the Brazil nuts and nutritional yeast in a food processor and process until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2. Mix in the rest of the ingredients.

FCT 

Use besan flour instead of regular flour and it has a naturally cheesy flavour when you cook it. And that is my fun cooking tip.

Have a delicious week, wonderful cook, and I hope you get to try out one of the dairy alternatives.

Oh, and before I go, I just wanted to say that when you replace dairy with alternatives, your body may end up detoxing, so you may not feel great for a few weeks, keep on with it, as after the detox you will feel absolutely incredible. 

Also after a few months without dairy you won’t miss it as much, so it is all about timing really.

Thank you so much for listening 

With gratitude, Veet