A salty, crumbly feta takes out top vegan cheese Photo: Vegan Society of Aotearoa Vegan Cheese Awards
A salty, crumbly feta cheese has just been named the country's best at this year's Vegan Cheese Awards.
'The Greek' is a dairy-free creation by One Love Planet, an Orewa-based business that creates artisan small batch cheeses from plant milk.
Despite being dairy free, it actually tastes remarkable cheesy - more impressively, it's taken out the Supreme Winner award just a year into owner and founder Janin Dei-Conti starting the business.
The secret was all in the fermentation, she told Afternoons.
The best vegan cheese
"We use plant milk, normally we use almond milk or soy milk or a combination of both, and we like to ferment our milks as well so I think that's where we shine a little bit."
Dei-Conti said the vegan feta tasted just like the real thing: "It can be used for absolutely everything, your standard feta in a salad, but its also fantastic to bake or crumble through veges, its got a beautiful melt as well."
As with any good product, the cheese came out of a series of trials and errors. Dei-Conti decided to become a vegan four years ago for the planet, but she could not fathom it meaning a cheese-less world.
"I was vegetarian for most of my life, since I was about 10, and I decided I had to go vegan for the planet, and because the dairy industry isn't the best industry from my point of view. Going vegan was the only way forward for me and I was missing out on my favourite thing, which was cheese, so I had to create my own.
"It started off very badly, it did not go down well with anybody in the family, but over the years I managed to create something that started to get to where, eventually my partner was like 'Wow, this is amazing, this tastes like cheese, you should really do something with this'. It sort of became a business just by itself."
A six-month stint in Greece many years ago cemented the flavours in Dei-Conti's brain - she knew exactly what she wanted to recreate with her cheese.
"I absolutely love real Greek feta, that salty kind of crumbly feta which is really hard to come by, so I tried really hard to get a similar taste to the one that I remembered from Greece. It was really trial and error, I can't tell you exactly when the breakthrough came."
Asked if the award-winning vegan feta was her favourite One Love Planet cheese, Dei-Conti tried to stay diplomatic.
"I feel like it would be rude to have a favourite cheese, it's like having a favourite child, they're all my favourites ... but sneakily the feta is probably one of my favourites."