It’s Pizza Friday, #1: The Great “Cheese” Debate

Last weekend I made a batch of pizza dough from Vegan With a Vengeance, split it into four, and froze it. The recipe makes enough dough for 2 pizzas, so the idea was to make a different half-sized pizza each Friday during MoFo.

For week 1, I decided to do my own taste test of the two top vegan cheeses on the US market: Teese and Daiya. I split the dough up yet again to make 3 tiny rectangular pizzas: one for the Teese, one for the Daiya, and one for a blend of the two.

Right out of the oven!

I made my own pizza sauce (also from VWAV) and topped each one with 2 slices of Yves pepperoni… keeping it to one side so I could taste the cheese in all its glory as well as with toppings.

CHEESE #1: TEESE VEGAN CHEESE

Price: $5.59 at Healthy Alternatives for 10 oz.

Stretch:
Very slight. Before I started eating it I tore it in half to see how it stretched and saw some strings of cheesiness, but as it cooled off it did not stretch as much.

Taste:
good, but chemical-y. Not as sweet tasting as the Daiya

Look/Feel:
Before baking, Teese has a very slimy consistency. However, baking dried it up a bit and it had a nicer look and feel when it came out. Very smooth.

CHEESE #2: DAIYA VEGAN CHEESE

Price: $5.59 at Healthy Alternatives for 8 oz

Stretch:
More so than Teese, and stays stretchy for a wider temperature range than does Teese

Taste:
sweet, junk food-y

Look/Feel:
Before baking, Daiya seems dry and crumbly. But don’t let this fool you, because when it melts it gets nice and gooey and you can see a layer of grease on top… just like I remember Domino’s pizza having.

PIZZA #3: HALF & HALF

I thought that this would be the best out of the three, because each cheese brings something a little different to the table both consistency- and taste-wise. However, the first thing I thought when I bit into it was that it tasted like feet. So hey, at least you don’t have to go out and buy two different kinds of cheeses to get the best finished product… you’re better off using just one or the other.

OVERVIEW
The Daiya is easier to use than Teese, because it is already conveniently shredded and bagged. The Teese comes in a somewhat hard-to-open tube and is a bit of a pain to shred since it is so soft right out of the package. But maybe you don’t want your cheese to be shredded, in which case use Teese because you can slice it up for, say, a fancy-looking white pizza or bruschetta.

I didn’t get a good amount of cheese on the Teese pizza, because I figured that the bigger shreds would spread out more when it baked and they didn’t. That made it a little harder for me to judge the Teese than the Daiya. I prefer the Daiya overall, though both cheeses are really good and I’ve known omnis to love pizza with either. Vegan cheese has come a long way in the past few years.

I still have some of each left over, so stay tuned for the next few days as I test them to see how they compare in other recipes!

Read Full Post »

Ultimate Vegan Week: Chicago VeganMania & Milwaukee (part 1 of 2!)

Last week I took a few days off from school and flew to Milwaukee to visit my good friend Kelly Peloza (author of the upcoming Vegan Cookie Connoisseur), see Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and of course go to Chicago VeganMania! I had a great time reacquainting with old vegan friends and meeting new ones, helping bake cookies for Kelly’s demo, and eating lots of amazing food.

Thursday.
I arrived in Milwaukee and we went to UWM to see Isa’s cooking demo, where she made an amazing root veggie and lentil chili. I’ve never cooked with lentils before, but she inspired me to do so because they are ridiculously easy to cook unlike other dry beans which take hours!

We then went to the Milwaukee Art Museum because Kelly had a class there, and admission is free on the first Thursday of every  month. Her friend Corey and I took the audio tour of the new European Design exhibit, then got our picture taken in Egypt with a 3-D camera.

After Kelly’s class it was back to the UWM for Isa’s presentation on Culinary Activism: Becoming a Baketivist and Beyond, in which she pointed out that people are more likely to listen to you if you have a tasty cupcake. She also showed that vegans can multitask to help people as well as animals by holding vegan bake sales to raise money for Haiti or having brunches/dinners to raise money for other charitable causes. This discredits the argument that many people employ saying vegans only care about animals, not people!

The day was so busy we hadn’t had a chance to eat much of anything, so we all went out to Classic Slice for pizza after the presentation.

 

Cheezy breadsticks

 

 

Mediterranean pizza

 

Friday.
Friday was spent baking, baking, baking. We made 150+ cookies for Kelly’s demo at VeganMania: hypnosis cookies, chocolate peppermint creme bars, and my personal go-to cookie: chai. All from Kelly’s upcoming book, which you should buy from her blog!!

 

Hypnosis cookies

 

 

Chocolate peppermint creme bars

 

 

Chai cookies

 

Corey and I made quesadillas for dinner filled with Daiya cheese, Tofurky turkey slices, spinach, and salsa, and topped off with guacamole and more salsa. It was a nice break from all the cookie baking that was going on. Photo from Seitan Beats Your Meat

I’m afraid that’s all the energy I have to write up tonight, I’m still working on catching up on all the sleep I missed because there was so much going on! Stay tuned for Part 2: Vegan Mania (the climax!) and afterwards (the falling action!)

Read Full Post »

The Great Pizza Disaster of 2009

My parents are away for the weekend, so like any teenage girl would, I decide to bust out the cooking skills and blast my (classic rock) music.

Okay, maybe that’s not what your typical 18-year old girl would do when left with the house all to herself for the weekend, but that’s what I did anyway. My friend Mary came back from college this weekend, so I decided to have some friends over and make pizza. I had a really awesome idea for buffalo pizza, for which I had specifically bought Teese when I was in DC, and was excited to make it.

Everything was going very well. I made the dough, made the buffalo tofu (somewhat similar to what I posted a few days ago) and sauce, and assembled the pizza. I put it in the oven for the specified time, and was trying to figure out how I was going to make two different pizzas when I only had one pizza pan (I had enough dough for 2 pizzas, and wanted to make a more standard pizza for those who might not like the buffalo tofu).

When the pizza was ready to come out of the oven, I tried to maneuver it out with hot pads but was not used to a) it being on the bottom rack or b) a 500-degree oven. I almost got it out, and then… the tipping point. The whole damn pizza, pan and all, flipped over and landed upside down on the rack, spilling all of its toppings onto the bottom & door of the oven as well as between the hinges of where the oven opens.

Cue me screaming expletives at the top of my lungs.
Cue me starting to bawl hysterically, frightening my poor kitten half to death.

This is what I spent all day on, using the vegan cheese I can’t (to my knowledge) get anywhere around here, trying to make something nice for my friends, myself, and my blog; ruined. A huge mess that I had no idea how to clean up. I’m not going to lie, my first thought was “how can I salvage this??” But it soon became apparent that salvaging was not an option.

Of course I knew I needed to take a picture of the disaster so I could document it here, but couldn’t remember how to work my camera, I was so hysterical. Ruining food is one of the things I hate the most… Wasting my time, wasting my energy, and most of all wasting the food itself. I had been really excited to see how the pizza would turn out, since it was something new and fun.

40 minutes later, my friends started arriving and, being the most awesome friends in the world that they are, calmed me down and even cleaned my oven (…and floor…) for me. I had put the ruined pizza on a cookie sheet, and was just throwing the tofu on top as I pulled it out of the depths of my oven. We joked that we would feed it to Mike, as he was the last person to arrive.

Mike arrived and we offered the pizza to him, but did not actually feed it to him. We all enjoyed leftover gaycake, and as they were finishing it off I made a second pizza (thankfully I was planning on making two anyway), topped with the rest of the Teese, zucchini, roasted red pepper, and black olives.

This time, I had Mike remove it from the oven for me because I did not trust myself, and it got out of the oven and onto our plates (and into our bellies!) safely and deliciously.

By the end of the night I found myself laughing as hysterically as I had previously been bawling. But damn, I really want to know how my buffalo tofu would’ve turned out… I guess I just need to buy some more Teese.

Read Full Post »