Vegan Cheddar and Sour Cream Potato Chips Recipe
Agile Kitchen
This cheddar & sour cream seasoning meets even the most demanding label scrutiny with its vegan-friendly formulation.
Inside the Formulations: Real Cheese Sauce Versus Vegan Cheez Sauce
It’s the battle of cheese sauces where everyone wins! Our Agile Kitchen™ team of culinary experts and R&D specialists has perfected a variety of cheese sauces based on our line of powdered and cheese concentrate ingredients that deliver desired flavor and mouthfeel in a more convenient, affordable format.
We’ve decided to give you a peek behind the curtains of these formulas to inspire you to develop new products or improve existing formulas with traditional and vegan cheese sauces.
But first, let’s detail why you need to be using cheese sauces in your prepared entrees, dips or macaroni and cheese products.
Consumer Convenience
Consumers are back to their hectic lifestyles and no longer have time to spend three hours on Tuesday night meal prep. Convenient, ready-to-heat-and-eat entrees are the perfect solution for quality and convenience demands.
Comfort Foods
Cheese = comfort and consumers crave (and buy!) comfort foods no matter how often they tell survey takers that they are eating healthier.
Plant-Based Opportunities
Although plant-based meat alternatives are struggling to find an audience, foods such as vegan macaroni and cheese are building a sizable audience because they taste so good.
Ingredient Innovation
Consumers used to cast doubts at powdered cheese mixes. Today, they celebrate them as they know they deliver exceptional flavor, mouthfeel and convenience.
Flavor Innovation
Consumers are constantly looking for what’s new, and with powdered cheese blends and concentrates, it’s easy for food manufacturers to push flavor innovation and drive excitement to the category.
There’s a demand for cheese sauces and ready-to-eat products with cheese sauces. Bluegrass Ingredients can help you meet the demand by formulating a traditional or plant-based cheese sauce using powdered and concentrated cheese ingredients.
Analyzing the Formulas
The flavor and mouthfeel of both of our vegan cheez sauce and traditional cheese sauce are exceptional. These attributes are table stakes in product development, and we invite any food manufacturers to our Agile Kitchen™ in Bowling Green, Kentucky to taste for yourself. However, how we attain this flavor and mouthfeel is quite different in each product.
Overall, it takes more ingredients and is harder to make an exceptional plant-based cheez sauce. Before we analyze the differences, let’s look at what makes them similar.
- Both formulas use one of our innovative cheese/cheez ingredients to deliver the cheesy flavor consumers love. In the vegan sauce, we use our Vegan Cheez Concentrate. The traditional cheese sauce uses Bluegrass Ingredients Cheese Powder.
- Each formula also uses a starch to provide body and ensure the perfect mouthfeel.
The major differences in the formulas come from some of the core ingredients used to provide the bulk, body and the texture consumers want from a cheese sauce.
- Our traditional sauce accomplishes this goal with a combination of our 50% fat non-dairy creamer and dried whey.
- For the vegan cheez sauce, we use oat powder and sweet rice flour.
The vegan cheez sauce also requires the help of a variety of seasonings like lemon powder, onion powder and paprika to round out the flavor profile.
The finished products are similar, but how our Agile Kitchen™ team gets there is very different. That’s why we love collaborating with food manufacturers to develop new products!
We are scheduling virtual consultations to review how our complete line of dairy powders, dairy concentrates, dairy seasoning blends, oat milk powders, citrus powders, plant-based powders and specialty ingredients can be used in your next new product success.
