Photo: © Les Petits Veganne
Vegan cheese has become mainstream. To add to the growing trend, 28-year old entrepreneur Anne Guth from Lorraine, France released a vegan camembert cheese as part of her recently launched company, Les Petits Veganne.
Guth’s company focuses on making nut-based cheeses, free from dairy and other animal ingredients.
However, Guth calls her products her “spécialités végétale” rather than “fromage,” the French term for cheese, since cheesemakers typically use dairy. Guth herself has been vegan for a few years now.
“The most difficult part was coming up with cheeses that were visually pleasing,” Guth told franceinfo in French. So, how did she come up with the steps to making such a beautiful dairy-free delicacy?
“[The steps] are the same as milk products,” Guth continued. “The technique is the same. The only thing is that we skip the curdling stage because I do not use milk, but a cashew nut puree [instead]. Therefore, there is fermentation, ripening and aging. From there, in one or two months, we will be able to create a capacity of 3,000 cheeses per month.”
Photo: © Les Petits Veganne
According to Guth, camembert needs to age for at least one month for it to be good.
Later, franceinfo offered the cheese to Clément Maudet, a professional cheesemonger from Paris.
Maudet was to compare the vegan camembert, which retails for 10,90€, to a pasteurized, dairy option that only retailed for 1,41€, and a raw milk camembert worth 6€.
According to Maudet, he clearly couldn’t smell any animal in it at all. The texture of the vegan camembert was different with a mousse-like feeling, and had a not-so-pleasant aftertaste.
Nevertheless, others thought that the vegan camembert was “surprisingly good” and “pretty similar” to the real deal. But what they are forgetting is that just because it’s vegan, does not mean it’s not the real deal.
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