Recipe My Vegan Cheese Sauce

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This recipe takes longer to get everything out or even read, than it actually does to make, if you are not needing to soak your cashew nuts. If you use blanched almonds you will very definitely need to soak your nuts. It is also good with macadamia nuts as well.

I've adapted this from Julie Piatt's book " this cheese is nuts!". I will say now that we have found the success of this recipe is totally dependent on the correct sweet miso being used and if you don't like the mIso you won't like this recipe!

Because of the size of the jug on my Vitamix blender, we always make a double quantity which is 8-10 portions, so I have written the recipe up for that quantity. We then divide the sauce up and freeze it in hummus pots and provided you thin the sauce and don't boil it when reheating, it is still very good.

If you're not a huge fan of miso or nutritional yeast, add half, taste and then add more as needed.

We use this brand of Miso, Miko Sweet White Miso, low sodium. It's the pink label. ¼ of a tub is needed per batch of sauce.


And this is the darker strong miso that we also add, just 1 tbsp.


Ingredients
350g cashew nuts
4 large cloves of garlic (use more if you like garlic)
2 or 3 tbsp of lemon or lime juice (we prefer lime juice)
1 heaped tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tsp black peppercorns (if using ground black pepper drop to half a teaspoon)
2 heaped tbsp nutritional yeast
½ cup or about ¼ of a tub Miko sweet white miso (50% Less Sodium)
1 tbsp of a dark, mature miso (optional)
500-750 ml cold water

Method
  1. If you don't have a blender capable of smoothly pureeing unsoaked cashew nuts you'll need to soak the cashew nuts overnight and drain - if you're not worried about keeping your cheese sauce "raw", you can substitute overnight soaking with a 20 minute bring to the boil and simmer in water approach. My Vitamix handles unsoaked cashew nuts just fine so I omit this step.
  2. This is a really easy sauce... put everything except 250ml of the water into the blender and blend until totally smooth. Then blend a bit more on maximum until it is warm/ hot enough to serve straight from the jug. If you want a thinner sauce or are freezing it, add the extra water. Unsoaked cashew will absorb water making the sauce thicker second time around and you'll find it better to freeze a thinner sauce because it thickens as it defrosts.
It is best to defrost the sauce at room temperature, thin it if needed and then reheat carefully ensuring you only warm it not boil it. The miso & nutritional yeast 'benefits' or vitamins/minerals are killed or destroyed by boiling this sauce and it does affect the flavour of the end product.




 
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