Pistachio Nut Cheese Recipe - Quick, Vegan and Dairy-free (2024)

This quick recipe for dairy-free Pistachio Nut Cheese is easy and foolproof. It slices, grates and will go golden brown when grilled. The only difficult part is not eating the pistachio nuts as they are!

It’s better to make this vegan cheese than just eating the pistachio nuts as they are sprouted, meaning the goodness and nutrients are more easily digested by the body.

The cheese is oil-free and contains heart healthy fats from the pistachionuts. Most vegan cheeses are dairy free but not healthy as they contain hard oils, flavourings an emulsifiers. This nut cheese recipe is made just from whole food ingredients and it tastes as good as it looks.

Also full of B vitamins and you can use a brand of nutritional yeast with B-12 to get that elusive vitamin. Suitable for vegan, dairy-free, paleo, plant-based, gluten-free. and general healthy diets.

This nut cheese will probably take other ingredients as flavours really well. Next time I may try it with dried apricots, rose essenceor dried cranberries.

I love vegan cheeses with my palm oil free oatcakes recipe. They are made from gluten-free oats and a mixture of five different seeds. However you can use whatever seeds you have in your cupboards.

This vegan cheese ended up more yellow than the bright green I was hoping for, but this isn’t really surprising as the pistachio nutsinside are mostly yellow and the nutritional yeast is yellow.

To make the pistachio cheese a bright green I would suggest adding 1/4 tsp of green powdersuch as spirulina, wheatgrass or barley grass. You won’t taste it but it will give a deepergreen colour and a nutrient boost.

I’ve found that this dairy free cheese is great to have with berries. The nutty green cheese looks and tastes great with tart raspberries.

I use pre-shelled unsalted pistachio nuts to make this. I believe this type of nuts has been lightly heated to help remove the shells, but at a lower temperature than normal shelled roasted and salted pistachios. So strictly they wouldn’t be considered raw but most people on a raw food diet would be fine with shelled nuts.

The pistachio nuts for this nut cheese are soaked in salted water to sprout them and make the nutrients more bioavailable. This is called activating nuts and apparently was part of several ancient cultures like the Aborigines. If you are short of time then just soak for 15 mins, but it’s best to soak for 8 hours or overnight.

Think of this recipe as a base recipe to add different flavours to suit your tastes. Please do let me know how you get on in the comments or tagging me on social media @nestandglow on Instagram.

If you like this recipe but are looking for a nut free vegan cheese check out my sunflower seed cheese. It’s another dairy free healthy cheese that can be sliced and grated!