Vegan Club: Vegusto Review

Hello! Today I’m going to talk to you about Vegusto, a company who make meat and dairy free food. I talk about being vegan and my morals and ethics frequently on this blog as it’s such a big part of my life, but I realise I don’t often talk about what that constitutes. So, I’ve decided to start demystifying being vegan!

To quickly recap, being a vegan means I don’t eat, use, or buy any products that contain animals or have used animals in any part of the process (I’ve written a lot more here). Food-wise, this obviously means meat as well as anything using dairy milk, eggs and a whole host of random things you might not realise get used in food.  Of course it’s easy enough to swap cow milk for almond milk in tea, but for certain foods it can seem quite hard to replace. This is where companies like Vegusto come in!

Vegusto make vegan alternatives to products that traditionally use animals, and are well established on the market (particularly for their cheese!). Vegusto kindly sent me a parcel of goodies and I’ve been making my way through various Vegusto products over the last couple weeks! 

No-Moo Melty Cheese (click for link)

Here’s my St Patricks Day meal (note the vague approximation of an Irish flag). Obviously I didn’t actually melt the cheese for this meal – I can confirm the cheese melted perfectly well but I actually preferred it like this. It had quite a mild flavour and I can also imagine using this in sandwiches.

Farmhouse Style Sausage

I’ve never tried an actual pork sausage (although I did eat a chicken sausage once when I was about 14: it was weird), so I’m not going to claim that the “texture was exactly the same” as a pork sausage. But I will say the sausage was definitely NOT a texture I would associate with tofu, soya chunks and the rest of the vegan fare you’d normally find. It was super filling: I don’t eat massive lunches anyway but I was completely stuffed after eating just one sausage. (Insert lewd joke here…)

 

Rustic Roast

OK, confession time. I grew up in a house where roast dinners weren’t a thing and I didn’t try one until I was 20. I’ve never really understood all the fuss; (it’s essentially just cooked vegetables doused in sauce? Where’s the inspiration, the creativity? The flavour? I’ll take a curry thanks) and  this tends to shock my British, roast-adoring friends more than is understandable (“it’s like you haven’t lived!”). Over the years, legions of British boys have diligently tried to rectify this grave injustice by cooking me a roast dinner (“You just haven’t had a good one!).

Last Sunday CB (remember him?) became the latest beau to join this dubious crew, knocking together the above meal and telling a story about how he used to cook beef really well (wrong crowd mate).The Vegusto roast did have some flavour of it’s own (i.e. I didn’t need to pour a vat of gravy over it) and I liked the thick texture, but I’m still not sold on roasts as a concept. There’s just so many other exciting things you can do with food? I’ll leave it to the carnivores.

NO-MOO PIQUANT 

This is like the breakout star of the Vegusto cheese range – we’d bought another packet before finishing the one Vegusto sent because this was just so good. I wasn’t a huge cheese lover back in my dairy-consuming past but I agreed with CB (who was) that this was really delicious. I think as a vegan you’re often having to play the game of “this is a great alternative to this animal dish” when you chat to carnivores, and although that’s a stupid game for a whole host of reasons, this is the cheese I’m going to suggest to people next time they ask for a decent vegan cheese.

No – Moo mild aromatic cheese

Pictured alongside about 5 other types of vegan cheese (also welcome to my manky kitchen).  This is marketed as being an alternative to cheddar. CB tried this and actually didn’t believe it was vegan cheese, reckoning he could slip some of this to his non-vegan family around Christmas without them ever knowing the difference (sorry if I’ve just ruined that plan bae), and presumably a lot of people have come to the same conclusion because this cheese has won LOADS of awards. As mentioned CB was a big cheese-lover back in the day, so above is my attempt at making a vegan cheese board for him! What do you reckon?

MUSHROOM AND NO-MOO VEGI BURGER

Burgers on the other hand I ADORE, and my word, this was a burger to get into. Thick “tear-y” texture (as in you can tear it apart? which is a good thing and something that meat-eaters tend to bang on about), rich flavour, perfect burger size and shape, it didn’t crumble, oh my god I may not be a seasoned enough food blogger to write about this in clearer detail but it was just great. I’ve already stocked up my freezer with more! I eat burgers at least once a week and believe me, this one is good.

 

So there we go – next time you’re out food shopping, consider adding some Vegusto in. I thoroughly recommend! Thank you so much to Vegusto for sending me the samples!