Nacho Cheese

This vegan nacho cheese recipe is a staple in our house and it’s not often that there isn’t a batch in our fridge.  It’s a rather simple recipe that doesn’t take a lot of ingredients, doesn’t take a lot of time, and yet somehow manages to taste incredible!  There are a few different variations that we use here at Vegan Voyagers, but today we’ll be showing you the basic core of the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of unsalted, raw cashews
• 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 lemon
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. onion powder

We use a Vitamix blender so if you’re using another brand, you may need to adjust the timing a bit, soak the cashews overnight, or send some ingredients through a food processor first.

We start by adding the water, cashews, nutritional yeast, salt, and onion powder into our blender.  Then, we remove the seeds from the red bell pepper and clean it out to remove any leftover pulp.  Chop the pepper up into a few smaller pieces that makes it easier to blend and throw it in the blender.  Cut the lemon in half and use a lemon squeeze to press the juice into the blender.  It generally equals about a tablespoon of lemon juice.

With everything in the blender, turn the blender on low and slowly increase speed up to 10 before flipping it over to high.  Blend on high for 5-7 minutes or until it starts to thicken up and / or steam starts to escape the vents and voila!  You have yourself a batch of vegan nacho cheese!

We use this stuff for anything from nachos to tacos to our own version of mac n cheese.  It really can go on just about anything!

Variations:

• For less of a bell pepper taste, use 1/2 of a bell pepper and add an extra half tsp of salt
• Not everyone enjoys onion powder, cut back to 3/4 or even 1/2 tsp of onion powder to lessen the flavor
• For a spicier sauce, add two seeded jalapeno peppers per batch
• Cheese needs salt, if you find you just don’t quite have the right flavor, add 1/4 tsp of salt to the blender, and turn back on for 30 seconds.  This process can be repeated, but be careful!  Once you over salt the cheese, it is difficult to go back.

Note:  This is an adaptation of the Vitamix Nacho Cheese recipe, but we have removed the extra water and corn starch for personal flavoring reasons.

Have a recipe you want us to try? Leave a comment below with the link and we may feature it in an upcoming blog. We can also veganize a lot of recipes as well!