Cheeze Sauce – An Imposter

A Cheezy Imposter

There’s a reason why I misspelt cheese here. It’s not really cheese sauce. It’s not really anything close, perhaps it’s a savoury béchamel wanna-be cheese sauce. In fact, that’s what it is!

In the last couple of years I have changed my diet considerably. The main changes have been that I have stopped eating most grains (but mainly gluten), most sugars and the killer, dairy. Of these foods, I miss dairy the most. Giving up bread and sugar was relatively easy. But even though I wasn’t a big milk drinker, giving up yoghurt and cheese was hard. This was precipitated by a food intolerance test that showed cows milk, wheat and soy as the main culprits. Potatoes and cashews came up too, but they were easy to omit. Interestingly, other milk (sheep & goat) did not come up and whilst I love a chevre, goats milk to drink is, well, yuk..

The upside of this is that I discovered that I love almond milk and hazelnut milk and making these milks in my Thermomix is so easy. Find a recipe here. Homemade nut milks taste vastly better than the commercial UHT types and you don’t need a Thermomix to make them, it’s just easier.

Here is a cheese sauce substitute, dare I say it, vegan substitute which will disappoint if you are expecting a proper Mornay, but if you are like me and shouldn’t have dairy, it will suffice. I have used it for lasagna and vegetables and the boys didn’t complain, so that’s saying something!

It heavily relies on the use of nutritional yeast, another hippy ingredient lurking on the health food shelf! It has no relation to normal yeast in that it is cultured and no live strains of yeast are present at all. Still, savoury yeast flakes are rich in protein and B vitamins, and free of sugar, dairy & gluten which is important for me.

Nutritional yeast has a nutty, cheesy, almost umami flavour which makes it popular as an ingredient in cheese substitutes. I use it as a seasoning; I put it in my vegetable stock and make the kids a healthy “chicken salt” with it too!

320g almond milk or cashew milk

7 tablespoons nutritional yeast

2 tabs macadamia oil (or butter if you’re not fussed about vegan)

20g cornflour

2 teas dry mustard

1/4 teas garlic powder

1/2 teas salt

pinch white pepper

pinch nutmeg

squeeze of half a lemon

 

Put all ingredients into the TM and cook on 90ºC SP 4 for 6 minutes. Cook a bit longer if you prefer it to be thicker. Use within 5 days.