Kite Hill - artisanal VEGAN cheese! [View all]

I am going to pick some up after work today -- they are working on a bleu! (the one devil cheese that keeps me from going vegan):



Tal Ronnen, the goateed chef behind Kite Hill, quivers with humiliation as he recalls the beginning of his three-year quest to create the world's best vegan cheese.

"Steve Wynn had just gone vegan," Ronnen says, referring to the Las Vegas casino magnate. "In 2009, he hired me to develop vegan menus for 12 of his restaurants." Ronnen was well known for having designed Oprah Winfrey's 21-day vegan cleanse. Nevertheless, he felt intimidated by the task of creating vegan menus for a half-dozen cuisines at once. So he was already nervous when he brought Wynn's chefs together for a tasting of vegan alternatives to staples like eggs, butter and milk.

"I brought in a vegan cheese that I thought was a decent product, and one of Wynn's chefs spit it out in front of everybody," Ronnen says, still palpably mortified. "It was so embarrassing."

The story of what happened next— Ronnen's journey through old-world cheesemaking, 21st-century biotech and Silicon Valley venture capital—perfectly expresses the newest wave in culinary entrepreneurialism: an exquisitely Californian combination of environmentalist and vegan ethics, earnest commitment to flavor and pleasure and confidence that money and technology can make the world a better place.

Even more intriguing, Ronnen also represents a trend of curious chefs opening their own research-and-development studios to chase their most out-there inspirations. In Copenhagen, chef René Redzepi's Nordic Food Lab recently received a six-figure grant from a Danish nonprofit to fund experiments in "insect gastronomy" as part of a United Nations push to get humans eating a more environmentally sustainable diet. And Momofuku chef David Chang's New York City lab is a hive of microbial projects, as his R&D team creates umami-rich, miso-style pastes out of pistachios, sweet potatoes and chickpeas. For some chefs, these labs are mostly about inventing new dishes for their own kitchens, but for others, like Chang and Ronnen, they hold the promise of reaching a far bigger audience.

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/engineering-the-future-of-artisanal-vegan-cheese