Fan Mail: Kite Hill Ricotta
I never expected to be in love with a vegan cheese, but here we are
When I switched from vegetarian to vegan about a decade ago, I had also just started to get paid to write for newspapers and magazines. At the time, I never considered the idea of a media outlet hiring me to profile vegan food companies. I certainly didn’t expect the biggest IPO of 2019 would be a brand that made plant-based burgers you could buy at fast food chains. (To be honest, if you had told me in college that one day my frozen black bean patty would be replaced with something that could “bleed” like real meat, I would have been disgusted).
But here we are, living in a world where I can find great meat and dairy alternatives at almost any supermarket. In fact, some of the alternatives are now so good that maybe they no longer taste like alternatives at all — just great food that happens to be made of plants. Case in point: Kite Hill.
Co-founded in 2008 by a scientist and two chefs (Tal Ronnen of LA’s Crossroads restaurant, Monte Casino, a chef and culinary instructor, and Pat Brown, a biochemistry professor at Stanford and founder of Impossible Foods), Kite Hill set out to use an artisan approach to making nut-based cheeses. “When the consumer has an opportunity to eat foods where there’s no sacrifice in taste, texture, color or…
