- [Narrator] The debut of vegan cheese
didn't inspire confidence.
- This is weird.
- The mouth feel is like a Play-Doughy mouth feel.
- [Narrator] But in the years since,
vegan cheese has gone from this.
- Oh, yeah, it really tastes like cheese.
- No, it doesn't.
- [Narrator] To a grocery store staple.
- [Rhett] I wouldn't know this wasn't cheese.
- I'm pretty impressed.
- [Narrator] But vegan cheese,
despite innovations and tastes and creativity in recipes,
still has a problem.
- There is no great plant-based cheese
that will melt, stretch, that will bubble, that will brown.
- [Narrator] So what's the science behind
why vegan cheese doesn't act like we expect?
[distorted music]
The problem is this tiny protein, casein.
Wired talked to two cheese researchers
to explain the science behind vegan cheese.
- It's not found anywhere else in the natural world,
only in the milk of mammals.
So what that really means is that mimicking casein
or replacing casein with a plant-based protein
or some other plant-based ingredient
is extremely, extremely challenging or nearly impossible.
- [Narrator] A lot has changed since these videos were made.
Improvements to plant-based fermentation,
the use of new bacterial cultures
and cheese-aging techniques, have created new varieties
of vegan cheeses that smell, taste
and look better than previous versions.
But a vegan cheese that acts and melts
like the cheeses we know and love remains elusive.
- What makes casein really special and very, very unique
is that it is an unusual type of protein.
Each protein molecule by itself
has this undefined structure.
If you were able to go to a really fancy microscope,
you would be able to see these casein balls,
but within that ball, we have no clue
how these caseins, like, behave or aggregate
or what their actual shape or form is.
And that is what's really unusual about them,
compared to any other protein.
These cheese variants that are more like cheese spreads
or cream cheese or things that are eaten like on a cracker,
and they don't need to melt or stretch.
It's been somewhat easier to recreate those
and that's why plant-based cheeses
have actually had better success.
- [Narrator] The vegan cheeses on the market
run into this problem.
We melted eight different cheeses
and while some did bubble and some even oozed when folded,
they didn't melt like an animal-based cheese did.
So what's the next frontier in vegan cheese science?
Two startups are tackling the problem in different ways.
First up, using a fungal strain to create casein.
The Belgium-based Those Vegan Cowboys started a bounty hunt,
a worldwide call for a fungal strain that feeds on grass
and makes casein without the cow.
- There is a bounty of 2.5 million Euro.
Ultimately, we would like to produce the caseins
in the best and the most efficient way.
When you compare bacteria with fungal systems,
we know, for my experience, that fungal systems
can more efficiently produce a homologous proteins
and can also reach higher concentrations.
- [Narrator] Second up, using microbes to create casein.
The startup New Culture in San Francisco
is focusing on making a melty, stretchy mozzarella
using precise fermentation.
- Fermentation is a process where we would grow a microbe,
or group of microbes, and in that process,
they would be eating food that we are giving to them,
which is sugar.
In a precision fermentation, what is different
is that instead of microbe being fed on sugar
and producing like a lot of different molecules,
we are instructing microbe and making it focused
to produce predominantly one ingredient, the casein protein.
It's a very like empirical and experimentive process
where we did go through thousands of microbes by now,
dozens of variants.
- [Narrator] Their vegan mozzarella isn't on the market yet,
but it promises it will have the same melt and stretch
as cow's milk mozzarella.
- We basically follow the standard,
the traditional cheese making processes
that have been around for thousands of years,
and then we adapt them to the way our casein exactly behaves
with other plant-based ingredients we use.
There is an enzyme called rennet and historically,
it was actually extracted from animals.
You add it to the milk and this enzyme
will basically gonna force the casein
to coagulate and turn into cheese.
And so this enzyme, rennet itself, is for the last 30 years
made from microbes by using precision fermentation.
It's made in a very similar way
that we're using to make our casein.
- [Narrator] Will making a vegan cheese
be enough to persuade cheese lovers to make the switch
to a plant-based alternative?
- There is some very emotional response
people have to cheese.
It's like this indulgence product,
whereas with yogurt or milk,
a functional or health product,
and people are just kind of more willing
to have other options.
- People, preferentially, do not want to compromise.
And that's why we also say,
we want to use the same ingredients for them,
made in a more sustainable way, without animals,
so that people have the product that they love to eat
and can also eat it in the future.
- There is a lot of problems with the industry itself,
as we're aware, growing animals, mostly cows,
industrially imposes the need for large amounts of land
and water to be used and what we're doing
by using microbes to produce casein
and to produce dairy products,
we will require only a fraction of land and water
that's needed for making traditional dairy products,
so it's really like a no brainer.
This is the technology of the future.