Background: I’m not vegan, but I love to experiment with vegan ingredients and dishes. This one is my Parmesan cheese substitute (think the ground Kraft kind, not the fancy grated kind) on top of pasta or in salads or on garlic bread. It’s also the foundation of a really great vegan chili crunch. It would even make a great topping for my old Midwestern casseroles, if only I had a reason to make one.
- Get some nutritional yeast.
- Get some fried onions in a can.
- Get some fried shallots in a can.
- Get some fried garlic in a can.
- Get some roasted, salted cashews.
- In the bowl of a food processor, mix 1 part fried onions, 1 part shallots, and 1 part garlic to 2 parts cashews and 3 parts nutritional yeast.
- Salt to taste.
- Blend until it’s the consistency of the grated parm in the plastic can with the green label.
- Put some in the fridge and some in the freezer.
Why It Works
- Nutritional yeast in high in umami and protein and it is fat-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, and sodium-free.
- The classic green-bean-casserole kind will work fine.
- These can be harder to find, but you should be able to source them from an Asian market.
- You can also find this at an Asian market.
- You could also go with raw and/or unsalted cashews here. Just add more salt in step 7.
- The logic here is that your ratios are tipped toward the healthy. In the end, you’ll have more cashews and nutritional yeast than fried alliums.
- You might not even need salt if you used salted cashews.
- If you don’t know that consistency by touch than you and I had very different early childhoods. What did you put on your spaghetti?
- It is probably safe in the pantry, too. But I like to make fairly big batches at once and the cashews could technically go bad in a few weeks or so at room temp.
Mods:
- Add dried chilis and a bit of oil and soy sauce and a bit of Sichuan peppercorns and you are headed toward chili crunch.
- Add dried herbs and oil for a great garlic bread topper.
- Add some fresh basil and oil to nudge it toward pesto.