Cashew and Chive Truffle Cream

A vegan cream cheese, a sauce or a dip? Whatever you call it, I love this recipe because you can use it with everything! 

Beautiful tossed through a spelt pasta with pumpkin, dolloped onto a grain salad, spread on salted pita crisps, a creamy filling for a tomato tart or on a pizza with mushrooms and rocket. This recipe was created about five years ago at the Commonground kitchen – the community I grew up in. I was part of a team of volunteers who very naively offered to be in charge of the food for Commonground’s first ever music and social change festival. That sounds like fun right - really how hard could it be? You can probably guess the answer to that one, but that is not the focus of today’s post!

So back when we were all excited and coming up with the recipes for the festival (the fun part!) we decided we wanted to offer a really good vegan pizza. Commonground had just built our first pizza oven and we wanted to show off what it could do. I had been around enough vegans to know that vegan pizzas often lacked something (or everything) and so we wanted to create an inspiring one for the festival. So our team created this recipe. And now, years later I use this recipe and many versions of it, all the time. I think it’s the truffle oil and the winey reduced shallots goodness that make’s it so yummy.

If you want to use it on pizza it goes perfectly with mushrooms, pine nuts and a little dressed rocket. I get the best response when I serve this spread out over a platter and top it with my broccoli, pine nut and quinoa salad. If you don’t like or don’t have truffle oil, just omit it. It will still be yum. You can also use a different herb combination. Basically this recipe is very adaptable so experiment away to get it just how you like it! I have served it here with pita chips. They are super easy to make. Just liberally coat some pita bread with olive oil (both sides), cut into triangles, lay out in a single layer on a baking tray, sprinkle with salt and bake for bout 10-15 minutes in a moderate oven until golden.

Cashew and Chive Truffle Cream

Prep time: 40 minutes

Cook time: 15 minutes

Waiting time: 6-8 hours for the nuts to soak

Dietary guide: Vegan and Gluten Free. FODMAP variation provided - see bottom of the page

Ingredients

200g raw unsalted cashews soaked in water overnight and drained

3 shallots (the purple Asian type not spring onions)

2 springs of thyme

1 bay leaf

1 cup/250ml of dry white wine

Zest of l lemon finely grated

1 tablespoon of lemon juice (pith and pips strained)

1 teaspoon of creamed garlic (see creamed garlic recipe at the bottom of the page)

1 tablespoon of truffle oil

1/3 cup of water

1 generous tablespoon of washed and chopped chives

Pepper to taste

¼ cup of good quality olive oil - I often use the oil left over from the marinated Meredith Goats cheese

¼ teaspoon of salt

Method

Peel and dice the shallots and add to a small saucepan with the wine, bay leaf and thyme. Cook on a medium - low heat until almost all of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from heat and discard the thyme and bay leaf. Place in a high powered blender* with the rest of the ingredients and blend for 1 minutes. Take the lid off and scrape down the sides if some of the mixture is stuck and not getting incorporated into the mixture. Keep blending (and scraping the sides if needed) until you have a smooth consistency.

You may need to add a little more water if your bender is struggling or if you are after a thinner end result say if you are using it for a pasta sauce. When you are happy with the texture, taste and adjust if needed. You may like yours with extra lemon, garlic or truffle oil, or decide you want to add some extra herbs. When you are happy, scrape out into a airtight container and store in the fridge. It should last about five days refrigerated.

*Cooking note: You will get the best results using a high-powered blender. You can still make this recipe if you don’t have one, you will just not be able to get it as smooth and creamy, and will probably need to add a little extra water to help it blend properly without killing your poor machine!

FODMAP dietary variation: Replace the creamed garlic with 1 teaspoon of garlic oil and omit the shallot reduction. You may want to add a little more lemon juice to adjust for the loss of tang from the shallots or extra truffle oil to give it more flavor.

How to make creamed garlic: The reason I use this instead of chopped up or minced garlic, when a recipe calls for raw garlic, is that this method reduces the heat and intensity of raw garlic and in my opinion, improves the flavour. This means I can use more garlic and get more garlic flavor into it without it being quite as full on. To cream garlic place 2- clove of nice and fresh peeled garlic in a mortar. Add 1 very generous teaspoon of nice quality salt and grind up with the pestle. It might sound like a lot of salt but the garlic helps to retard its saltiness. Once its pretty smooched up and like a rough paste, add two teaspoons of olive oil and continue grinding and mixing until you have a nice nearly smooth paste. It’s now ready to use. It’s best used in the first couple of hours but you can cover it with oil and keep it for a day if you need to. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can do this on a chopping board using the back of a metal spoon. It will just test you patience a bit more.