Los Angeles is having an artisanal vegan cheese movement—who knew?
Five years ago, chef Youssef Fakhouri decided to sequester himself in his West Hollywood home kitchen with a singular goal: to find the secret to making nut-milk cheese taste like the “real” thing.
Around the same time, chef Tal Ronnen began searching for a way to successfully apply traditional European cheese-making techniques to nut milk and even enlisted the help of a Stanford biochemist.
Clearly, the race to find a non-dairy cheese that doesn’t taste like sawdust has been an impassioned one. The result? L.A. is having a delicious artisanal vegan cheese moment, with Fakhouri’s new WeHo cheese shop Vromage and Ronnen’s Kite Hill line of cheeses.