Vegan cheese lover
In the heart of every vegan, no matter how intensely wedded to eating more ethically, is a deep yearning for cheese.
This undeniable pull towards corpulently ripe, oozing camembert, the salt tang of Cornish cheddar, or the metallic, bacterial thrill of blue veined stilton, is hard to satisfy with the communal garden, vegan cheeses, which are plastic textured, anodyne tasting concoctions made of coconut oil. These imposters bear as much resemblance to 'real' cheese as Frankenstein's monster does to a human being.
But, help is at hand for those, like myself, for whom taste without morals, and flavour created out of cruelty and pain - the constant forced child bearing and removal of calves from the mother, and her reduction into a commodity producing copious milk and rennet - leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Enter: the humble, white, crescent shaped cashew nut (which is actually a fruit I think). For when this is fermented and then creamed, with the addition of various bacterial strains, what one gets is a pleasantly umami, moreish, savoury taste. Albeit with a consistency more akin to spreadable cheese. But four out of five ain't bad.
And there is nowhere in Medway that does this better than the Cheese Rooms Botanicals in Rochester High Street. On my vegan cheeseboard were five different kinds of cheese, including a paprika flavoured one, a cheese with an intriguing and dramatic black truffle flavour, a slightly harder cheddarish cheese and two others which were kind of mild and innocuous.
These came served with some nice bread and some water biscuits along with a chunk of quince jelly and a spicy chutney. We took our time eating it and it made us feel like epicures with morals. And we washed it all down with red wine (the wine per glass considerably bumped up the price and was almost as expensive as the cheeseboard priced £14. But, it was just so de rigeur, as posh people say. But next time I'll probably ask for tap water).
What more could one want? - Well, since you asked, I think the vegan scientists should focus on creating a range of textures next.