Vegan innovator and Miyoko Schinner isn’t your typical cheesemonger. The founder and former CEO of Petaluma’s vegan Miyoko’s Creamery, she’s now on a mission to share her recipes in a new cookbook all about plant-based alternatives to dairy products like milk, cheese and even ice cream. And when she wasn’t at the bench testing how different plant oils react to cheese cultures, she founded a nonprofit farm animal rescue, Rancho Compasión in Nicasio.
You might recognize the epicurean activist’s name if you’ve browsed grocery store shelves and seen Miyoko’s Creamery-branded plant-based cheeses and butters. Even though she started the brand in 2014, she was controversially ousted as the company’s CEO in June 2022 and is no longer a part of the business. Her latest cookbook, “The Vegan Creamery” (Ten Speed Press, $27) was released Sept. 16 and showcases her scientific streak, working to reimagine satisfying dairy-free alternatives to cheese as she crafts creative products like mozzarella made with watermelon seed kernels or coconut-mung bean yogurt.
We recently chatted with her to hear more about what drives her work, both in developing recipes and founding Rancho Compasión, a farm animal rescue in Nicasio. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me about this cookbook. What inspired it?
A: We are in an evolutionary period where food is rapidly changing. One of my concerns is the corporatization of the food system in America and worldwide. About 70% of our calories today come from ultra-processed foods, most likely from one of 10 multinational corporations. Some people are in love with cooking and putting things together, but oftentimes that cooking still entails buying a lot of products and then assembling them. I’m getting philosophical here, but the ability to understand where our food comes from, to grow food, to cultivate food, to prepare food, to serve it to not just yourself, but to your family, your friends and your community, is a huge part of who we are as humanity.
I’m focused on a word that I coined, “kitchen sovereignty,” and on human beings getting back in the kitchen and learning about food. This is what we did for thousands of years, and in the last, not even 100 years, we have lost that ability. If we don’t have a corporation selling something in a package, most people no longer know how to make it. And that’s kind of a frightening thing.
Q: How did you become passionate about food and cooking?
A: I think my passion for food really started when I became a vegan in my mid-20s. I literally worked my way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child, and I tried to veganize all of the recipes. Take a recipe like a demi-glace. I read her recipe with fascination. I tried to imagine what it would taste like. And then I started thinking about, what are those flavors, and how can I make this completely vegan? I was living in Japan at the time, and used my knowledge of Japanese foods that have a lot of umami, like shiitake, miso and soy sauce. Applying those Asian ingredients to traditional Western ingredients, like red wine, was the beginning of how I began to think slightly out of the box.
Q: Why focus on vegan cheese specifically?
A: I wrote “The Homemade Vegan Pantry” in 2015 and “Artisan Vegan Cheese” in 2012. This book is the outgrowth of the conviction I have about the food system that’s been developing over the last couple of decades, but really has become firmly entrenched in my heart and soul over the last few years.
Trying to make dairy products out of plants is, overall, a new thing. People didn’t look at plants as a source for making things like cheese, except for very limited examples, such as fermented tofu in China, or in the Persian history of almond milk, or soy milk in Asia. They were fairly limited, and there wasn’t deep science around it. I wanted to dig deep into what plants can do. How far can we take the science? What are the proteins in different plant milks that will produce different flavor profiles? Which plant milks will form curds? Which ones will develop certain flavors over time if you inoculate it with certain bacteria, yeast and molds?
Being on the bench and experimenting for the last few years has been a great passion of mine. I decided I could start yet another company and protect my IP, or I could share it with the world, and hopefully other people will advance the science, because we are in the nascency of understanding how plant milks behave. Rather than just trying to protect it and try to monetize it — that’s the corporate model — I feel that we need to democratize food. What I can do is share what I’ve developed, and hopefully, other cheese makers and plant milk people out in the world will read it. I see this as the beginning of the evolution of what can be done in this realm.
Q: I’m intrigued by the idea of publishing the recipes in your cookbook as a way of sharing intellectual property. Who do you hope adopts these recipes?
A: Well, I write in my introduction something like, “If Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, I hope this is a book that launches a thousand vegan cheese producers.” And I really meant that. I’ve visited little vegan cheese producers around the world that took their inspiration for my first book, “Artisan Vegan Cheese,” which was much more limited in terms of the techniques, technologies and ingredients in this book. If we’re going to reduce our impacts on the climate — not just greenhouse gas emissions, but land and water use — we really do need to decrease the amount of animal foods consumed by people. How do we give them an alternative? That’s where this comes in.
Q: What is your recipe development process like?
A: I have to repeat the experiment multiple times and figure out why something worked or why something didn’t work. For example, I have two blue cheese recipes, and I’ve always used coconut oil in those recipes. I had this idea that the blue cheese mold liked coconut oil, but it was just a hunch. So I made the blue cheese without coconut oil, and while it developed the blue mold, it had no blue cheese flavor. I did a lot of research, and I found a scientific paper from last year, which found that it was only coconut oil that allowed the lipolysis, or the breaking down of fats, to take place, and something called nano ketones to be released that create the flavor. I always try to figure out: Why did it work? Or why didn’t it work? What can I do to change it? I don’t have a food science degree or anything. I have a philosophy degree. But I think it comes from pondering truth. Why did this happen?
Q: Rancho Compasión, your animal rescue ranch, is celebrating its 10th year. How did that come about?
A: It came about by accident, actually. I moved out here to the countryside in West Marin, and I had some land. Someone told me about a couple of stray goats that needed a home and asked me to take care of them. I thought it was going to be temporary. Then these little, tiny goats came, and I realized they were like dogs with horns, and I fell in love with them. And then shortly thereafter, another friend called me up and said, “A man died, and he has three pot-bellied pigs. Can you take them?”
Within six months, there was quite a crew of critters here. We formed a nonprofit and started getting volunteers. It took a while, and it was mostly a very small animal rescue before we developed all of our programs. Now, we have a rapidly growing youth education program with after-school programs, summer camp and field trips, and we work with a very diverse group of kids from all over the Bay Area. We don’t indoctrinate them about veganism or anything like that. They just learn to build connections with individual animals, and they work in the garden and plant vegetables, harvest them and maybe cook them. And over time, these kids find peace. Through rescuing animals, we are also able to give back to schools and the student population.
Q: How does your animal rescue work tie into your work as a pioneer in the vegan culinary space?
A: I mean, most people have no idea where food comes from, especially kids. The first time they see beans growing in a garden, they have no idea what it is. Sometimes they’re like, “I can’t eat that. It’s not from the store.” When you teach kids about the food system and empower them to grow things … you would not believe how excited kids get. This summer, we had summer camp, and I was the lunch lady preparing all the meals. I’m not kidding; kids were coming back for seconds and thirds on things like salad, vegetables and tofu. The work ties not only into veganism, but into the need for people to understand that they can participate in the food system in a much more holistic manner that is good for them, the planet and animals.
Details: “The Vegan Creamery: Plant-Based Cheese, Milk, Ice Cream, and More” by Miyoko Schinner (Ten Speed Press, $27) was released Sept. 16. Rancho Compasión hosts regular public visitor days and events, including an upcoming circus-themed fundraising gala Nov. 15. Learn more at ranchocompasion.org.