Cheese Rennet Vegan

While vegetarians who made the lifestyle choice because of animal cruelty try their best to avoid cheese rennet, vegan individuals usually avoid cheese altogether, since it is made with dairy products. However, with today's vegan specialty products they'll be happy to know there are cheese rennet vegan options.

Rennet is an enzyme used to coagulate cheese, helping it make the transformation from liquid milk form to a solid. Traditionally rennet is extracted from the stomach lining of butchered veal calves. The calves have the rennet in their stomachs to help digest milk from their mothers. Older cows no longer have use for it and stop producing it.

Animal rennet is one of the most common ingredients in mass produced cheese, which can make it quite a hurdle for those looking to only eat cheese with vegan rennet. The following nationally distributed cheeses, plus many others, contain rennet from cows or other animals with four stomachs:

• Land O’Lakes asiago, provolone, parmesan, Romano and American
• All Pollio cheeses except mozzarella and ricotta
• Tillamook Vintage White Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese
• All Kraft cheeses except U.S. produced Swiss and Neufchatel
• Sorrento provolone and Parmesan

Cheeses that use animal rennet will usually have rennet or rennin listed on the ingredients label. Rennin is the less common name for the exact same product.

There are two alternatives to animal rennet that can make cheese rennet vegan. There is vegetable rennet, which is made from enzymes found in safflower, melon, fig leaves or thistles, and there is microbial rennet, which is made from mold cultures or bacteria or are created artificially in a lab. These enzymes work to separate the milk in a similar fashion to how yogurt is made. More specifically, they digest the sugars in the milk and produce lactic acid, which makes the milk curdle and solidify, just like animal rennet does.

All types of vegan rennet are usually listed on product labels as either enzymes or vegetable enzymes, without any further detail. The words vegetable enzymes are a guarantee that the rennet is vegan, but enzymes is generic enough term that it can refer to both animal and vegan sources. It requires the diligent vegetarian or vegan to make a call to the manufacturer’s customer service line to double check.

Some companies will use the term vegetable rennet, although it is not that common. It’s interesting to note that vegan rennet is not rennet at all, since the word rennet refers to an animal’s stomach lining. Manufacturers have just adopted the term to denote the similar purpose.

The whole rennet issue is more of a problem for lacto ovo vegetarians, who don’t eat meat but consume eggs and dairy, than it is for vegans. This is because a vegan, who pledges to use absolutely no animal products, would not be eating dairy cheese anyway, vegetarian or not. Luckily, vegans don’t have to miss out on the joys of a good grilled cheese sandwich. They have dozens of dairy free soy cheeses to choose from. These include:

• Better Than Cheese
• Tofutti cheeses
• Sheese by Bute Island Foods

Also available is Cheese by Road’s End Organics. Instead of being made with soy protein, this cheese is produced with nutritional yeast, making it suitable for vegans with soy allergies.

These vegan cheeses are available in typical block or slice form as well as as grated cheese, cream cheese and even nacho cheese dip. They are also used as ingredients in convenience foods, like pizza and lunch pockets and as a powder in boxed macaroni and cheese. Most organic markets will have a good enough selection of these items to satisfy even the most discerning of vegetarians and vegans.

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