I committed a crime. Well… at least I broke the law. In my own kitchen. And now the entire European Union will be after me.
I’m joking, of course. It’s hard to keep a straight face about something like this. But on the other hand, the issue is more important than it might seem at first glance.
What am I talking about?
The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 14 June 2017, Case C-422/16:
“Purely plant-based products may not, in principle, be marketed under names such as ‘milk’, ‘cream’, ‘butter’, ‘cheese’ or ‘yoghurt’, which EU law reserves for products of animal origin. This also applies where such names are supplemented by clarifications or descriptions indicating the plant-based origin of the product.”
So what exactly should I call my creation?
INGREDIENTS
- 1.5 litres of soy milk (or more)
- Yogurt starter culture (according to the instructions on the package)
- 1 tablespoon of sugar (if using unsweetened soy milk)
- Juice of one lemon
METHOD
Bring the soy milk to a boil—carefully, because soy milk foams up even more enthusiastically than cow’s milk. Let it cool down.
Add the yogurt culture. If the milk is unsweetened, add a tablespoon of sugar and stir.
Pour the milk into a yogurt maker (see notes) and leave it running for at least eight hours, until you get the consistency of a strongly fermented yogurt.
Transfer the finished yogurt to a pot, add the lemon juice, and heat gently over very low heat for 20–30 minutes, without exceeding 70°C (158°F). Do not let it boil!
After a while, a clearly visible curd will form. Carefully pour everything onto a cloth-lined sieve and leave it to drain. Once most of the liquid is gone, wrap the curd in the cloth and squeeze firmly.
VARIATIONS
You can also use lime juice, citric acid, or even mild vinegar to curdle the protein. The important thing is the acidic environment.
You can make this forbidden dairy alternative from any plant milk with a reasonably high protein content. In Germany, for example, pea milk is available (I’ve already made yogurt from it), as well as lupin milk, which I still need to try.
NOTES
You’ll need a yogurt maker.
You can also make the yogurt in many bread machines using the fermentation programme or in multicookers that have a dedicated yogurt setting. The key is maintaining a temperature of 40°C (104°F) for an extended period, allowing the bacteria to do their work.
The finished cheese is a bit drier than traditional Polish cottage cheese, probably because soy milk contains far less fat. Next time I want to add some fat—perhaps avocado oil. The challenge will be creating a stable emulsion so that the oil mixes properly with the plant milk.
SERVING
Serve it exactly as you would traditional cottage cheese: with radishes, chives, tomatoes, or yogurt. Use it as a filling for pancakes or savoury crêpes. It also works beautifully fried with onions and served with pasta.
Back in 2017, the CJEU ruled that terms such as soy cheese, plant milk, or soy cottage cheese were illegal within the European Union.
An even more absurd proposal followed: Amendment 171, debated in the European Parliament. It would not only have banned dairy-related names but also packaging resembling traditional dairy cartons, visual representations evoking cheese wheels or milk splashes, descriptive phrases such as “buttery” or “plant-based alternative to yogurt,” and perhaps most ridiculously of all, even claims about the lower carbon footprint of plant-based products compared with animal ones.
Fortunately, that nonsense, heavily backed by dairy lobbyists, was rejected. The same happened to Amendment 165, which would have prohibited terms such as plant-based burger, vegan sausage, and probably even the plant-based blood sausage I tried in Poland recently—which, to be fair, was surprisingly decent.
But the issue goes much deeper than simply mocking bureaucrats or criticising agricultural lobbies.
Ironically, these amendments reveal a split within the meat and dairy industries themselves. Some companies are desperately trying to stop the plant-based trend, while others are enthusiastically embracing it.
One common argument against terms like soy milk, vegan cheese, or plant-based burgers is that these products have always been animal-based and that such names never existed historically.
That is simply wrong.
Centuries ago, people already made almond milk, almond cheese, and fig sausages.
And in more recent history, Polish vegetarian cookbooks offer countless examples. Kosowska’s Vegetarian Cookbook from 1929 contains recipes for Viennese cutlets made from oats. In One Hundred Lenten and Vegetarian Dishes, by the immensely popular interwar author Pani Elżbieta (Elżbieta Kiewnarska), we find cutlets made from beans, peas, root vegetables, carrots, spinach, fennel, buckwheat, potatoes, rice, lentil loaves, and even bean cheese.
The more fundamental question is this:
What actually makes a burger a burger? Or cottage cheese, cottage cheese?
Is it the ingredients alone? Or does the product’s function on the plate and the method by which it is made matter as well?
I made my soy cottage cheese using exactly the same process as traditional cottage cheese. Its essential component is also the same: coagulated protein.
Yes, I quite like the playful alternative name sorozhek that I once encountered somewhere. But honestly, there is no good reason why a product made from plant protein should be denied the name cottage cheese simply because the protein comes from soybeans instead of cows.
And beyond all that—last but not least—this kind of evolution happens in cooking all the time.
It is one of the fundamental reasons why culinary culture develops.
Recipes change over centuries. Today’s Polish bigos bears little resemblance to its original form, which consisted almost entirely of meat with perhaps some apples and onions. Frankfurters were originally made only from pork. Chicken ham is a modern invention. By definition, ham meant pork. A hamburger was beef and beef alone.
There is absolutely no reason to erect absurd bureaucratic barriers against culinary creativity or to preserve recipes as if they were sacred standards locked away in Sèvres.
The beauty of cooking lies precisely in constant change, experimentation, and improvement.
Without that, cuisine becomes a museum.
And while spending a day or two in a living-history village, playing “How Our Ancestors Lived,” can be tremendous fun, nobody would actually want to spend their entire life there.
Even the increasingly popular movement of culinary reconstruction in Poland isn’t about reproducing old dishes exactly as they once were. We cook on different stoves, with different ingredients, under completely different circumstances. Reconstruction is really about creating something new: interpretations and arrangements inspired by historical flavours.
Plant-based cooking is particularly fascinating in this regard. By its very nature, it deconstructs traditional meat dishes, recreating familiar flavours from entirely different ingredients.
And then it goes one step further, transcending the original and using it merely as a point of departure for new explorations of taste and texture.
Any attempt to limit that imagination and creativity is a crime greater than extinguishing a star.
How do I know? I do my homework — no smoke and mirrors. Here are the receipts.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.