VeganMoFo Day 8 - "Cheese" Spread

The Original version

I've been making fake cheeses since the late 1970's, when I used a recipe from Doris Bate and Louise Hagler's book, The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook (Now known as The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook but still contains the same recipes and hand-drawn illustrations). It tasted weird, but had a lot less calories and was a heck of a lot healthier than "American processed cheese food" that was starting to be sold in grocery stores.


It took a while to convince my husband to eat these cheeses, and to this day he still prefers his greasy dairy versions, one of the main reasons he wound up with the quadruple bypass in July. But now he has no choice. He's finally ready to grasp the goodness of nooch-based cheeses. He's already been eating them on his pizzas and mac and cheese casseroles, but I haven't made a spread to use on sandwiches in a while. As long as I bought that bread for yesterday's sandwiches, I figured we may as well have another sandwich day and use up the rest of the loaf. 

This time, to keep with my VeganMoFo theme of using recipes from 2 specific heart-healthy books, I'm using this recipe from Mary McDougall:

"Cheese" Spread
Servings: Makes 2 cups
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Chilling time: 1-2 hours

15 ounce can Great Northern or navy beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup chopped pimentos
6 tablespoons nutritional yeast
2 tablespons lemon juice
2 tablespoons water
1/2 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)

Place all ingredients in a food processor and blend until very smooth.

Refrigerate before serving.

Hint: Use on crackers, sandwiches or baked potatoes. Thin slightly with water, heat gently, and use as a sauce over vegetables or on enchiladas or tortillas. Make into a fondue with some non-alcoholic white wine and dip bread chunks into it.

The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart
John McDougall, M.D. and Mary McDougall
(1996), ISBN: 0-452-27266-1 
page 304


I didn't bother taking a picture of the stuff whirring around in my Ninja blender. You've seen one blender-full of nooch sauce ingredients spinning around you've seen them all. This is one I nabbed from Google Images.

We spread the cheese sauce on the bread, topped it with a slice of yesterday's marinated red peppers and some baby spinach leaves, then put them on the griddle to brown.

Sloppy, but YUM! This didn't solidify but stayed in a near liquid state, better suited for a sauce, not a spread. It's a good thing this is the end of the bread, because I could probably eat 2 or 3 more sandwiches of this stuff, it's that good! But I don't so I can't. 

Would I use this again? It was the same as most other nutritional yeast based sauces I already use, so I won't seek it out, but if it pops up when I'm looking for a sauce recipe I'll use it. Next time i want a cheese spread or even slicing cheese for a sandwich I'll peruse Jo Stepaniak's Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and choose one of those, like this one:

But because right now I'm only cooking the heart-healthiest foods, and that recipe has both cashews AND tahini, it's going to wait a long time to be made again.

The rest of the spread is going to be used for tomorrow's lunch, so stay tuned.