Why does cheese made from soy milk not taste like cheese made from cow’s milk?
What is in milk that makes cheese taste good and give it that cheesy flavor and is it possible to recreate it without milk?
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There are lots of different fats, sugars, and proteins in both plant “milks” and animal milks. Not only can the proportions be different, but some components might not exist in plants that exist in animals (and vice versa).
Some of those components are similar enough that they taste the same between different types of milk, while others have more distinctive tastes (and/or other important properties relevant to cooking/etc.) Soy cheeses don’t taste as good as animal cheeses because they are missing some of those animal proteins that humans really enjoy from animal-derived cheeses.
So the question is “Can we recreate the desired properties of animal-milk cheeses without animal milk?” and the answer is “Maybe!”. There are a number of biotech startups trying to do these kinds of things as we speak! One of which is PerfectDay who are working to tweak GMO yeasts (if I remember correctly, though maybe it’s a different microorganism) to make whey or casein proteins identical to the cow proteins… all without the cow! (Though, a cow somewhere had to have a blood sample taken to sequence it’s genome so that the cow-whey gene and cow-casein genes could be put into a digital database and downloaded and DNA printed to be put into the GMO yeast.)
It’s still early days for the technology, but it looks pretty promising that one day we’ll essentially be able to brew cows-milk in an industrial vat the way we brew beer now.
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