You know those fish that you can stick in a tank and will eat pretty much anything, like the algae off the sides of the tank? Those sucker fish? I’ve got to be the sucker fish of my family. If no one wants it, I’ll probably take it and do something with it. My sister bought a ton of Daiya cheese a few months ago when she took a break from her raw food diet. I think she had to, or something like that. She made some gluten-free, vegan pizza, and since then there have been several baggies of shredded cheeze sitting in my mom’s freezer. The cheeze bags got the boot from Mom’s freezer into mine recently.

I figured I’d give vegan pizza a go. Why not? Daiya’s got great reviews online for vegan cheese. And hey, if I can have pizza and call it healthy and good for me, well, sign me right the hell up.

The Daiya mozzarella style shreds vegan cheese looks like shreds of parmesan cheese, and has a kind of cheesey smell. It would be hard to tell it apart from regular shreds of mozzarella (the cheapie bagged kind), or parmesan.

Made a crust primarily of bread flour. Chewy thin crust on a pizza stone. Albany John whipped together a chunky sauce out of canned tomatoes. 550F pizza stone for 6 minutes.

Holy moly – it really melted! It looks pretty much like mozzarella cheese. Flavor-wise… um. It was okay. I think a little goes a long way. It didn’t really taste like mozzarella. The first bite I was like “Woah. This is melty and kinda cheesey. Maybe it’s kind of like mozza-oh no. It’s different.”.
There’s a coconutty-sweet end to it, and it tastes more like a melty/warm sweet cream cheese with extra tang, yet has the pull and meltiness of mozzarella. It was kind of a mind freak for someone who’s used to eating the real stuff. After reading the ingredients label, coconut oil is one of the ingredients, so at least my brain’s not making that flavor up out of no where.

I think Daiya vegan “mozzarella” cheese is really close to mozzarella for people that can’t eat mozzarella and don’t know/remember what it tastes like. If you eat mozzarella, you’ll be able to spot the difference in flavor. If you don’t eat mozzarella for whatever dietary reason but really want to, you’ll be like “Oh, shit! It’s mozzarella! Halleluja, Daiya!”.

I’m still gonna keep it in my freezer, just ’cause I think pizza might not be the best application for me because the sweet flavor is so blatantly obvious (which makes me mildly disconcerted the entire time I’m eating it since I’m like “Hmm. It’s just a little off,”). Truthfully, I hope my sister will be like “I’m not eating raw food on XYZ day,” and then I can be all like “I’m making you vegan, gluten-free pizza, biatch!” in the near future and then I can feed her something that she likes. Okay, and I might have a problem with hoarding things in my freezer, but it’s edible, so how is that really a problem?

Still, I’m really impressed with its melting properties. I think I will try to find a sweeter application to use it with. Have you tried this stuff before? Any suggestions?