Vegan Nacho Cheese Sauce

I was craving nachos. I used to eat a lot of them in University when we went out to the pubs. They tasted especially delicious when paired with a few ice-cold beers. But now that I’m old(er) and wise(r) I know what piles of chips covered in mounds of cheese, and paired with alcohol does to my body.

I also no longer have the ability to sleep until 1 pm the following day to recover from these types of benders (yes, you actually can go on a nacho cheese bender, I speak from personal experience). Luckily, I now have the pleasure of being woken to a bunch of little people running around the house at 7 am. To be accurate, one of those little people is now an inch taller than me, so I obviously need to find me some new adjectives to describe my current room-mates (aka my kids). But, I digress.

Back to finding a yummy vegan alternative for nacho cheese sauce. After browsing the internet, I found that most sauces either used a cashew base (which I normally use because cashes are great at mimicking a cheesy, creamy texture) or a potato base (which is really smart because potatoes are great for thickening sauces). I even found one that used eggplant (how cool is that)! After mulling things around in my head, I decided I really liked the idea of a veggie-based, super nutrient-dense, nut-free sauce, and since we hadn’t done our grocery shopping yet, my choices were limited to what I had in my fridge.

So I decided to create a cauliflower-based sauce, which I knew would be popular because cauliflower is a low-carb, low-calorie cancer-fighter with tons of detoxification benefits. It also has loads of beta-carotene, vitamin C, anti-bacterial and anti-microbial benefits. Now, we likely are going to be dipping tortilla chips into this sauce, so it’s not completely health-promoting, but it’s a much better alternative to the traditional version.

Vegan Nacho Cheese Dip

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Ingredients

• 1 small head of cauliflower, broken into florets
• 2 carrots, diced
• 1 small onion, quartered
• 1 whole garlic clove, peeled
• 1/2 cup nutritional yeast
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 1/2 -2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• freshly-ground black pepper, to taste
• optional: 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Instructions

1. Add the cauliflower, carrots, onion and garlic clove to a large pot, and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until soft, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat.
2. Place boiled vegetables, along with 1/2 cup of the water you used to boil the vegetables into your blender. Add remaining ingredients and carefully blend until completely smooth (as the sauce will be super hot).
3. Serve immediately with a bag of organic tortilla chips, or maybe even try it on some gluten-free pasta.

Vegan Nacho Cheese Sauce was last modified: January 15th, 2017 by Michelle