Vegan Dairy Queen Miyoko Schinner Is Teaching A Homemade Plant-Based Cheese Masterclass

Miyoko Schinner, a pioneer of the plant-based dairy space, is the latest instructor to teach a course at online learning platform Meet The Vegans.

Months before the launch of her seventh cookbook, Miyoko Schinner is back doing what she best loves: making dairy-free cheese.

Two years after she left the brand she founded, Miyoko’s Creamery, Schinner has joined forces with online learning platform Meet The Vegans to lead a masterclass on all things plant-based dairy.

The course is inspired by the forthcoming book The Homemade Vegan Creamery, whose recipes and techniques will form the basis of the digital cooking class, which will feature cheeses, butter, and snacks made from leftover ingredients.

Schinner has been making and selling plant-based cheese for decades, but the latest cookbook contains “new ways to make cheese, using fermentation and coagulation”, and ingredients she hasn’t publicly explored before.

“I’ve gotten back into the kitchen over the last year, back on the bench, and I have been working and innovating all these new recipes on making fresh and hard cheeses using a variety of plant milks, whether it’s watermelon seeds or sunflower seeds,” she said.

Miyoko Schinner looks to promote artisanal vegan cheese

The course, which will set you back $149 and features over 30 videos, has a range of innovative cheeses devised by Schinner. The Golden Sunshine cream and mascarpone are meant for both sweet and savoury dishes, the Reggie vegan goat’s cheese is a chèvre-style offering, joined by another French favourite, a truffle-infused vegan brie.

There’s also an Angel’s sharp Cheddar made from potatoes, and a watermelon seed mozzarella. Schinner will also be teaching participants how to make culinary butter with high-fat content for baking, cooking and spreading. And for all the pulp leftover from making the base milks and cheeses, she has devised a recipe for zero-waste crackers.

“Plant-based cheeses today, commercially, are sometimes… I would have to classify them as ultra-processed foods. A lot of the stuff that’s available today is unfortunately just made out of oil and starch. You know, usually the worst forms of oil,” Schinner told the Meet The Vegans podcast.

“And so I can’t really recommend them, which is why I really thought that it was important to try to discover a new way to make cheese, embracing whole foods,” she added, outlining how she ended up publishing her 2012 title, Artisan Vegan Cheese.

She added that vegan cheesemakers around the world are now taking a more whole-food-forward approach. “Collaborating with Meet The Vegans allows me to share my passion for artisanal vegan cheese with a global audience,” she said, outlining her aim to inspire “both new and seasoned chefs” about plant-based cuisine.

“Miyoko is truly the queen of vegan cheese, and sharing her latest groundbreaking innovations ahead of her cookbook launch means our community gets an exclusive glimpse into her unmatched expertise,” said Meet The Vegans co-founder Laura Belyea. “This course marks a milestone not only for our platform but for plant-based cuisine as a whole.”

Meet The Vegans was established in January this year, and features courses from a host of plant-based chefs around the world, including Wicked Kitchen co-founder Chad Sarno and former Unity Diner head chef Greg Hanger.

Moreover, the platform also offers an AI Chef tool to help home cooks decide what to make with the ingredients they have, in a bid to reduce food waste and promote plant-based versions of conventional meat dishes.

Celebrating plant-based milk for what it is

Schinner made her name through an all-vegan eatery called Now and Zen, which became popular for its plant-based turkey. After selling the restaurant, she started a namesake natural foods company business, which shut a few years later. At the time, the chef already had three cookbooks to her name, and in the years that followed, she doubled down on the vegan cheese world and created Miyoko’s Creamery (then Miyoko’s Kitchen) in 2014.

The business rapidly became a leader in the alternative dairy space, selling non-dairy cheeses, butters, and spreads. But in 2022, Schinner was ousted as CEO, following internal disputes with executives. The company sued its founder for alleged breach of contract, a violation of trade secrets, and stealing company IP, but Schinner countersued, saying she was “blindsided” and alleging that sexism led to her dismissal.

Months later, the two parties came to a resolution, with Miyoko’s Creamery installing former Beyond Meat CMO Stuart Kronauger as CEO, and Schinner going back to the bench as well as building her animal sanctuary, Rancho Compasión, in San Francisco.

“I’ll be sharing new ideas for many plant dairy foods, including new methods for making cheese and butter (no, the experimentation hasn’t stopped, and I’m at the top of my game again),” she told Green Queen in an interview last year.

While her masterclass does have analogues like Cheddar, chévre, mozzarella and brie, she posited the idea that plant-based milk should be celebrated for its own flavours. “We have cow’s milk cheese and then we have sheep’s milk and goat’s milk, and they don’t try to imitate each other. Each milk has its own characteristics and they create their different varieties of cheeses,” she said on the platform’s podcast.

“If we evolve that into the realm of plant milk, we can think about cheese in the same way. Why not let each plant milk express its own unique properties? Let’s create new cheeses. I believe the future of cheese is getting back to plant milks, rather than trying to replicate animal cheeses using oil and starch,” she added.

“Let’s explore the world of plant milk and find out what flavours and textures can we create from them. It’s an entire evolution that will continue into the future. We’ve got a couple thousand years to get it right.”