— Cindy Amick

I do make, uh, plant-based cheese. Some of them I make sliceable. Some of them are kind of like a chev kind of a style. The ones that are sliceable, I typically use an agar, uh, an agar in it. And um, I'll, you know, you can buy agar basically in a powder form and you can add it to things and it works like a gelatin form. In fact, our plant-based pro course and our plants plus, um, both have a great recipe that Char Nolan, um, great friend and instructor, uh, you know, came up with and um, uses in that class as well too. It's, uh, if you're in plant-based pro, definitely look at the alternatives in there for cheese, and you'll find that in there. But agar, um, is typically a, a really good way to be able to make plant-based cheese sliceable. Now, there are a lot of other ways that are traditional ways, um, of making cheese as well, but you can make them out of other things like cashews, nuts and other things as well, and using cheese gloss, um, you know, uh, different, you know, professional techniques to be able to make that happen as well, depending on what kind of cheese you're making and what you're starting with as an ingredient. But typically, agar is kind of the one thing I go to. Um, I don't have like a cheesecake for vegan cheese or anything like that. Um, and I will occasionally make a cashew one that I'll squeeze out with cheese cloth and let it kind of, um, sit for a while and it becomes sliceable, but it's not like sliceable, like you would cut like a piece of cheddar or something like that, um, you know, and put it like on a sandwich, but it, it would hold up to be like on a cracker or something like that just fine. Um, uh, you know, but the agar does a really good job of that.