Surprising Vegetarian and Vegan Food Alternatives
One of the hardest things about being a vegan or a vegetarian is having to give up some of your old favorites. From dairy products such as cheese to meat products such as chicken tenders, there are a lot of things that suddenly vanish from your diet once you’ve decided to go veggie.
With limited options and limited time to cook from scratch, it may often seem like there’s not much for a vegetarian to do but feel bored with what’s appearing on his or her dinner plate. However, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Tons of vegetarian and vegan alternatives to popular foods have been produced, many of which are surprisingly accurate in their flavor and in the feel of the food itself.
Cheeses are one of the most difficult things to recreate, so it’s no surprise that typically the only vegan cheese to be found at the grocery store is crafted to capture the flavor of that infamous sliced cheese in a plastic wrapper – that is, American. But if you know where to look, you can find an incredible range of delicious changes that will offer you plenty of items recreating everything from Parmesan and Mozzarella to Swiss, and even Brie, hard as that may be to believe.
A range of meats has also been recreated. While the vegan “meat” of the past raised a few eyebrows, the newest technologies in food product design have given flavorists the ability to create everything from ground beef to chicken without any meat in them whatsoever. Other components that can be used to create food flavors include Advanced Biotech’s Natural Guaiacol for smokiness, or Natural Savory Complex for the umami flavor that truly gives these types of products their delicious and surprisingly realistic flavor.