Cheese is almost a no-no on the MIND diet. You have to eat it less than once a week to get the point for cheese. This has been one of my biggest struggles. It’s a good thing you don’t have to be perfect to reap at least some of the benefits.

One of my first posts was ‘No Queso Quesadillas’ in which I omitted the cheese altogether. That was OK and I tried to not miss the cheese, but I still would prefer cheese.  A couple of weeks ago a reader posted a comment on this recipe that nutritional yeast makes a substitute for cheese. I started googling and found other sites that agreed. So, I decided to try it. It look like it is a vegetarian staple.

My grocery store doesn’t carry nutritional yeast and it’s not very good at special requests, so I shopped for it on Amazon.  There were several options, but I decided to try the one from Bob’s Red Mill.

I got 8 oz. for $13.37. The package says that the contents contain about fifteen ¼ cup servings.

I decided to start with a cheezy sauce.  There are several recipes on the web, but since I bought Bob’s Red Mill brand I decided to start with the Red Mill recipe, with a few changes. This is my version, optimized for the MIND diet:

Cheezy Sauce for the MIND diet   Printable version

• 1/4 cup Nutritional Yeast
• 1/4 cup White Whole Wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup cold water
• 2 TBSP olive oil – light flavor
• 1/2 tsp Dried Mustard

Instructions:

• Mix the first 3 ingredients in a sauce pan. Add the water and whisk until smooth.
• Cook over medium heat (6 out of 10 on my stove) until thick and bubbly – whisking frequently
• Let simmer about a minute
• Remove from heat and add olive oil and mustard

Makes about 1 ½ cup. Use immediately or refrigerate.

Cheezy sauce is about the right consistency when just off the stove to use on cauliflower or nachos.  When refrigerated, it thickens and looks kind of like Velveeta. The color is a bit more mustardy (even before you add the mustard). I am thinking that next time I will make it with 1% milk instead of water and that might tone down the color a bit.

So, how does it taste??

Straight off the spoon — not bad, but not great. Reminiscent of cheese, but a little off and it leaves a bit of an aftertaste.

One of the reasons that I had decided to try a cheezy sauce is that I recently made Rotel Cheese Dip for a party. You know – the kind with Velveeta Cheese and Rotel Tomatoes. I knew that was bad, but I ate some anyway. I wanted to find a way to make that taste “legal.”

So, I mixed 2 TBSP of my Cheezy sauce with 2 TBSP Rotel tomatoes.
That was edible but kind of runny. The second time I made it I drained most of the juice off the tomatoes and that worked a little better.  It’s still kind of runny. It might be less so if I had used butter or margarine instead of olive oil, but that would not be MIND diet friendly. The taste is not as strongly cheese as the original dip.  When I make it again, I think I will add less of the tomatoes.

Next, I am going to try it on cooked cauliflower and probably some nachos.

Do you have any ideas how to use nutritional yeast to make a yummy cheese-like dish? Or, another way to substitute for cheese?  Please comment.