Been looking for vegan pesto options? Presto.
. Usually Parmesan plays a starring role as well, adding the cheese’s characteristic umami and nuttiness to the equation. It’s a delicate balance, with every element playing perfectly against the others. That's how a sauce becomes a classic.
So what happens when you remove one card—say, the cheese—from the perfectly stabilized pesto house you’ve built? In an instant, things collapse. Suddenly the garlic is all you can taste, or the lemon, once a welcome hit of acidity, overpowers the rest of the mix. It’s fine! It’s edible. You’ve just made something, something that isn’t necessarily pesto. Without some umami to root it to the ground, the sauce in your food processor has an identity crisis you can taste.
Of course, there are many reasons why one might want to leave the Parmesan out of their pesto, like lactose intolerance or an empty cheese drawer and abject laziness; if those apply to you, you should not be subject to a lifetime of confused pesto. I’m inclined toand have made my fair share of alt-pestos with varying degrees of success, so I took it upon myself to put eight of the most commonly suggested vegan pesto substitutions to the test in a head-to-head competition.
My conclusion may seem anti-climactic at first, but it should really be inspiring: I think there is no single best vegan pesto, just a bunch of veryvegan pestos that are perfect in their own unique ways. Do I sound like a kindergarten teacher? It’s true, I love all my dairy-free pestos equally, and I found myself imaging the ideal applications for each of them based on their slightly different flavors.
The flavor of nutritional yeast is polarizing: those who love its tangy vibe shake bottles over toast andwith abandon, while others say the funk is a bridge too far. Even if you fall on the latter end of that spectrum, pesto is a great destination for the ingredient, as garlic, basil, and lemon are equally heavy-hitting and provide necessary balance.