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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Humans have spent millions of years evolving very precise taste and smell receptors so you can tell the difference between good and rotten meat, good and spoiled milk, poisonous and edible plants, and so on.
Food makers can be very clever, but at a fundamental level, the chemicals present in cooked soybeans are very different from the ones in fermented milk. It’s like saying “Why can’t a carpenter make a house out of wood that looks like it’s made out of brick?” Because plants and clay are different stuff, and we’re good at noticing what stuff something is made with.
It’s the specific proteins, and the way the fats are emulsified into the milk that makes the big difference.
You’re just starting with very different raw ingredients. Soy milk doesn’t really taste like cow’s milk either. Some brands do better than others but it can taste pretty “beany”. Coagulated soy milk protein is tofu, which can be prepared a million different ways. The closest tofu to cheese I think I’ve ever had was stinky tofu which had a flavor like blue cheese. It had a very different texture though.
Because soy milk doesn’t taste anything like cows milk. Cheese for all intents and purposes has one major ingredient. If you change that one ingredient of course its not the same
Outside of good answers other made, I just want to say that I just wish that vegans/vegetarians stopped making things taste like other things.
For example there are 100s of vegetarian indian meals that taste absolutely amazing and they don’t pretend to be anything else. Vege burgers and vegan cheese are just abominations I dont understand.
EDIT: I forgot most of this website is American and burgers are something people eat often there, so veggie patties are a convenience
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.
Why is it difficult to make a chili pepper taste like a banana?
Cheese is made by coagulating fresh bovine lactation with rennet, a complex set of enzymes produced in the stomachs of ruminant mammals.
It is, by definition, a product made almost entirely using the bodily fluids of animals.
What makes cheese taste so good are the ***milk*** fats, proteins, and the various byproducts of coagulation, including ***milk*** sugars and salts naturally occurring in ***milk*** and as a result of processing the ***milk*** with rennet to coagulate it.
To replace literally all of those ***milk*** compounds with synthetics or vegan options and expecting the same results in texture and taste is nearly (but not totally) impossible.
“Good” is subjective, but what makes it taste like cheese is everything about it. The particular fats, the particular proteins, the particular sugars, the natural enzymes in milk, enzymes from other sources (rennet in particular), the particular bacteria that act on the different chemicals, and even environmental contaminants (for instance Swiss Cheese requires hay dust to act as nucleation sites for the bubbles to form). If you don’t recreate _all_ of this almost exactly, you’ll get a different result. That result can be _good_, but it won’t be the same.
Modern technology makes it possible to get _much_ closer (and potentially identical) by using genetically modified yeast to produce the _exact_ chemicals required to duplicate milk without the animals. I found a 2018 blog post from a company called Perfect Day who is doing exactly this. Their “animal-free dairy” appears to be available in products right now through partnerships with several companies.
What is cheese on your case.m ? I mean, I can give you 10 cheese from a basic supermarket and they will taste extremly different. There is no cheese taste.
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