Cashew Cheese Sauce (Vegan Cashew Dip)
Learn how to make vegan cashew cheese sauce easily at home with just a few ingredients and enjoy it guilt-free. This vegan cashew dip recipe is very versatile, and you can use it in many ways - as a dip, pasta sauce, and top over nachos and tacos.
Ingredients
- 1 cup Cashews preferably raw
- 4 tablespoon Water
- 1 tablespoon Lime juice or apple cider vinegar
- 2 tablespoon Nutritional yeast
- ½ teaspoon Black pepper freshly ground
- ½ teaspoon Salt adjust to taste
Instructions
Soak the Cashews
- In my experience, soaking the cashews for a couple of hours works well. But if you plan to soak them for more than 4 hours, keeping them in the refrigerator is a good idea.
- Discard the water from soaked cashews and rinse them once.
Blend the ingredients
- Take a blender jar and add rinsed cashews, nutritional yeast, salt, red chili flakes(if using), ground black pepper, lemon juice, and water.
- Blend these ingredients into a smooth sauce. Add water little by little while grinding the ingredients.
Store or serve the sauce
- Once you have blended the sauce perfectly, empty it from the blender jar and transfer it to a glass container. I always store it in the refrigerator, where it stays nice and fresh.
- Refrigerate the creamy vegan cashew sauce and use it within five days.
Notes
- If you are not soaking cashews, you might need additional water to grind the sauce into a smooth paste.
- To quickly soak the cashews, soak them in boiling water for about 30 minutes or so.
- You can even use a food processor to make this cashew cream sauce. But make sure to soak the cashews.
- This recipe uses black pepper and salt to flavor the sauce. You can use dried herbs like oregano, thyme, and parsley to flavor the sauce.
- You can flavor this cheese sauce with fresh herbs like cilantro, mint, basil, or parsley.
- I haven't used garlic to make this sauce, but you can use one or two pods of fresh garlic or ¼ teaspoon of garlic powder while making this dip. You can even use ¼ teaspoon of onion powder.
- You can use sunflower seeds as a cashew substitute, but the taste of the sauce will be different.