The no-compromise cream cheese swap
Our search for a bagel’s dairy-free best friend
Heya, and welcome back to Cool Beans! Over the last week, I’ve eaten a lot of bagels in the name of science. I’ve been sampling and slathering the top dairy-free cream cheeses to figure out which one reigns supreme. We’re all trying to cut down on cheese and its outsized footprint, but I ask you: What’s life without cream cheese? A naked bagel? A frosting-less carrot cake? No guava pastelitos? Luckily, plant-based cream cheeses have been around since the ’80s, and there are more options now than ever. But because we crave a tangy schmear that can do it all, I also took all the contenders to the oven to see which one baked into the creamiest, cheesiest-tasting filling for a fave Super Bowl snack.
The test: The great fake cream cheese test
Cream cheese is far more than just a bagel’s best friend. It’s a workhorse ingredient that adds tang and richness to sweet and savory recipes alike. Besides the obvious (frostings and cheesecakes), a bit of cream cheese makes for fluffy cookies and featherlight scones and biscuits. On the savory side, its creaminess and subtle cheesy flavor is suited to anything from pasta sauces to party dips. Can these plant-based versions handle all that? Here’s what I’m looking for:
Texture. Is it smooth and spreadable at room temperature, without becoming overly runny when it hits a hot bagel?
Taste. Has it nailed that mildly cheesy and tangy flavor that’s just a little bit sweet?
Bake-ability. Does it act like real cheese in the oven, getting hot and bubbly and just the right amount of toasted and brown?
Appearance. How much does the color and consistency resemble real cream cheese?
There are dozens of specialty brands of nondairy cream cheese on the market, but I focused on six that are most readily available at the average American grocery store, including my local Publix. First I tried them all straight up, on a toasted bagel. Then I did a bake test to see which one made the best filling for the ultimate jalapeño poppers (👇scroll down for the recipe 👇). I ranked them on a scale of 0-5 🥯s, with five being the absolute best swap for the real thing. Let’s see which one smothered the competition.
Kite Hill Cream Cheese Alternative
Kite Hill has a wide variety of almond-based dairy alternatives like yogurt, sour cream, ricotta, and filled pastas. The cream cheese is made from almond milk with live cultures—aka the good kind of bacteria that helps with fermentation and makes food taste tangy. It comes in a variety of flavors, including strawberry, chive, everything, and garden veggie.
Texture. It’s very soft and airy, like a whipped cream cheese, but it has a mild grittiness that some might find off-putting. It also gets a little watery after sitting at room temp for a few minutes—not exactly what great brunch fare is made of.
Taste. Despite its live cultures, I found the overall flavor super mild in terms of tang. It was also very salty: 9% of your daily recommended sodium per 2-tablespoon serving, the highest of any faux cheese on the roster.
Bake-ability. The filling baked up nicely in the jalapeño poppers with a slightly crusty outside and a creamy inside. Unfortunately, even with all the seasoning I added to the filling, the tang was still too mild for my taste.
Appearance. This beige-ish spread is very mousselike out of the fridge, but after sitting out for a bit it began to get a little watery.
Rating. 🥯🥯
Miyoko’s Plant Milk Cream Cheese
With only four ingredients (cashews, coconut cream, cultures, and salt) and no added gums or oils, Miyoko’s cream cheese is the simplest blend of all the cow-free cheeses on our scorecard. Miyoko’s butter won our great Un-butter Taste Test, so I had high hopes for this one. It also has the most protein of the bunch with 3 grams per 1-ounce (~2 tablespoons) serving—that’s more than classic Philadelphia.
Texture. This smear was the firmest of the lot, so it didn’t spread gracefully. It also had the grittiest texture and reminded me of the not-super-smooth texture of DIY nut cheeses I’ve tried in the past.
Taste. Houston, we have tang—a lot of it. If you’re familiar with the flavor of coconut yogurt, you know what I mean. There’s a lot of acidity, which overall makes this one of the more flavorful options in the bunch, but it might be a little too strong for some.
Bake-ability. Another nice bake! This spread sat firmly in the jalapeño and formed slightly more of a crust than the Kite Hill, but was still soft on the inside.
Appearance. There’s a slight gray-beige color that I’ve gotten used to from other Miyoko products, but it’s demonstrably not creamy white like regular cream cheese.
Rating. 🥯🥯🥯½
Oatly Cream Cheese
Oatly entered the plant-based game with its oat milk, which can be found in pretty much every coffee shop thanks to the foamy Barista Blend. It has since added oat milk ice cream and cream cheese to the menu. The cream cheese is made of oat milk, palm oil, and potato starch, and it comes in two flavors: plain or chive and onion.
Texture. Something about this one seemed more luxurious than the others. It’s rich and creamy in terms of mouthfeel and has excellent spreadability.
Taste. The tang factor is very balanced, and while there’s a hint of oaty aftertaste, it hits pretty darn close to the real deal.
Bake-ability. In the oven, this spread almost completely melted and bled out of the pepper, leaving very little filling to be tasted.
Appearance. It has a yellowish hue and gives a nice, thick schmear that doesn’t melt into a warm bagel.
Rating. 🥯🥯🥯½
Philadelphia Plant-Based Cream Cheese
The biggest name in the cream cheese game came out with plant-based options recently in three flavors: plain, chive, and strawberry. All are coconut oil–based with added potato starch and faba bean protein. While none of our cheesy contenders are super high in the muscle-building macro, Philadelphia’s clocks in at zero grams. It also is tied for the most saturated fats, with 6 grams per 2-tablespoon serving—equivalent to its dairy-full counterpart.
Texture. In terms of mouthfeel, this was indistinguishable from its dairy-filled cousin.
Taste. There’s a slight tang, but overall the schmear tastes a lot more like a margarine than cream cheese.
Bake-ability. Unlike the products that made Philadelphia famous, this did not hold up to baking very well. Half of the filling spilled out of the pepper and it got too thin in the oven.
Appearance. While it resembles the real deal in color, it melts too quickly, like butter, on contact with a warm, toasted bagel.
Rating. 🥯½
Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese
This OG vegan brand has produced cream cheeses for a long time, and they are still the most widely available. If you’ve ever gotten a bagel from the deli with vegan cream cheese, it was probably Tofutti. This version is made from tofu, of course, along with palm oil and some preservatives.
Texture. Tofutti is the smoothest and most spreadable of all the cheeses I tried right outta the tub, even straight from the fridge.
Taste. I really can’t figure out what this tastes like, but something about it reminds me of play dough. A quick Google search told me I’m not alone. With a severe lack of tang and no cheesy flavor, it left much to be desired. It’s also a little sweet, which is odd considering there’s zero sugar in it.
Bake-ability. While it didn’t spill out of the pepper in the oven, the filling was extremely soft and formed no yummy crusty bits. The taste was slightly enhanced with the seasonings but still not the most flavorful. Texturally, it would make a great cheesecake, especially when it’s loaded with spices like Pale Blue Tart’s PSL cheesecake.
Appearance. Aesthetically this spread could masquerade as regular cream cheese.
Rating. 🥯
Violife Just Like Cream Cheese
Violife cream cheese is available in block or tub form with plain, strawberry, and chive varieties. Since every other contender today is in tub form, that’s what I tried. Coconut oil and potato starch are the main ingredients, making it nut free. At $5.99 for 7 ounces, this was the priciest option I tested. LIke Philadelphia’s faux cheese, it contains 6 grams of saturated fat per serving and zero grams of protein.
Texture. This spread has a smooth and buttery texture at first, but then it leaves an oily mouthfeel.
Taste. It’s tangy and salty, but similar to Philadelphia, it tastes like a margarine spread—this time with a hint of coconut flavor. If someone said it was plant-based butter, I would believe them.
Bake-ability. The worst in the bake show. Full stop. Not only did it bleed out of the pepper, but the entire filling slid out in one big, drippy mess once I picked up the jalapeño.
Appearance. It was very white and melted quickly on the bagel, like butter—and not in a good way.
Rating. 🥯
The Results
Not one of these faux cheeses hits on every front, so we’re looking at a split decision. While most of these spreads excelled in either texture or flavor (but not both), Oatly was the closest thing to schmear perfection on a bagel. It has all the tang I’m looking for, not too much, and had a certain je ne sais quoi the other options were lacking that made it taste like a true cream cheese. Texturewise it’s on point: smooth and spreadable but also not melting too quickly on hot bread, like some of the oil-based options.
Unfortunately, our on-a-bagel champ had one of the worst results in the bake test. Miyoko’s and Kite Hill took the textural W in the jalapeño popper showdown. Both managed to get crispy on top while remaining creamy in the middle, but Miyoko stood out in the flavor department by a long shot. The extra tanginess really highlights the other seasonings and makes these peppers sing.
The recipe: The tailgate snack nobody will guess is vegan
Jalapeño poppers, for many people, are not to be messed with. Their simplicity and deliciousness rely on a short list of ingredients that includes a ton of dairy—and sometimes pork if you like to wrap yours in bacon. Making a craveable popper without any of these things is a challenge, but ’tis the season.
My version uses plant-based cream cheese, of course, but I doctored it up with nutritional yeast (for umami), scallions, garlic, and my favorite flavor weapon: chipotle in adobo sauce. They’re not topped with crispy bacon, but rather crowned with a generous sprinkling of crushed tortilla chips. You probably won’t miss the cheese or the pork in these halftime hotties.
Chipotle Jalapeño Poppers
Yield: 12 poppers
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