There's finally a few (e.g, Violife) who have started to get close. Kite Hill's almond ricotta is probably 1:1 for me and I eat it when I find it on sale.
I think if you're after "luxury" cheese (the kind you might enjoy with a bottle of wine) it's harder, but for day to day cheese you throw on a sandwich/tacos/whatever it's passable.
(My two cents, of course - everyone tastes different, and you should eat real cheese if that's what you want)
It's just not the same.
For a mozzarella, I recommend Miyoko's https://miyokos.com/collections/vegan-mozz
Reading "How Not to Die" gives pause on the long term health impacts of eating dairy based on evidence from nutrition studies.
Cheddar though... I'd have to disagree. To each their own though!
That’s not true. American cheese is built on cheese but adds butter and cream and sodium citrate to it as an emulsification. The product is a sort of cheese based product of varying quality of rather poor (common) to essential (any good hamburger).
So maybe it’s not cheese on it’s own, but it is a product of cheese and the core ingredients are (should be!) dairy.
> Typical formulation for Analogue Pizza Cheese, from Fundamentals of Cheese Science:
Ingredient Level added (g/100g Blend)
Casein and caseinates 23.00
Vegetable oil 25.00
startch 2.00
Emulsifying salts 2.00
Flavour 2.00
Flavour enhancer 2.00
Acid regulator 0.40
Color 0.04
Preservative 0.10
Water 38.50
Condensate^ 7.00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169697
The list above is for "analogue pizza cheese" but that's just the most common use of this kind of "cheese": as pizza topping.
So, in a way, "vegan cheese" is not the worst kind of thing in the market that's labelled as "cheese" while not even close to the real thing.
Btw, many people who are not vegan or vegetarian eat this stuff and think it's cheese. I mean because it's on pizza. And it kiind of melts, right? What else do you expect to find sort of melting on top of pizza? Cheese!
So, yeah, 100%, you can totally and absolutely fool consumers by emulating the look, taste and feel of a real foodstuff. But usually that's because those consumers are so used to eating fake stuff anyway that they have forgotten what the real thing tastes like... if they ever even tasted it.
The main idea is to take a mild cheddar and tame it further while changing its texture and to make it melt nicely. This is why any other cheese on a hamburger is inferior.