Hack Your Snacks: Afternoon Tea Talk at Fringe Vault
Article and photos by Michele Wisla
A small, hungry group of snack enthusiasts gathered at The Fringe Club on the afternoon of Saturday 27 November 2021 to hear about (and taste) healthy options to munch on in-between meals.
Our two speaker’s products went together like salt & pepper! We had gourmet seed cracker maker Monica Bharwani of Divine Indulgence by Monica and artisan plant-based chef and ‘cheezanista’ Amy Elkhoury of Nuteese.
Both women had a similar motive to make and offer healthier snack choices for themselves and their families. As they each separately built up their knowledge and skills, they grew their passions into locally based small businesses.
Originally in hospitality and catering before getting married and having twin boys, Monica started out by making healthy, yet tasty gourmet snacks for her friends and children. They were so good, and people were asking her to make it so often that they offered to pay for at least the ingredient cost. It turned out that she was getting so many requests that she decided to turn it into a business. She ended up focusing her product offering on nut and seed-based crackers.
Monica wanted to make a healthy product for her family and friends, thanks to being frustrated reading food labels listing ingredients like hydrogenated oils. She wanted to create a snack that had ingredients that you recognized and that could incorporate super seeds into our diets in a healthier, tastier way.
She came up with a range of 10 different crackers. The crackers are great on their own and taste fantastic with Amy’s cheese. Monica also uses them as croutons sprinkled on salads all the time. She found that her business took off over the last year or two, since everyone staying at home was ordering her crackers.
Amy, the founder of Nuteese, an artisan plant-based cheese brand, makes cheese with activated nuts. Originally working in multimedia and design, Amy became a yoga teacher to bring more balance into her life. After she moved to Asia, she studied raw food with renowned celebrity chef Matthew Kenney, the father of raw food. She’s a big animal lover with five cats and a dog, and she became a vegan for the animals, as well as for the environment.
She launched Nuteese in 2020 and is the only person in Hong Kong now making aged vegan cheese. She found that the vegan cheese on the market in stores was very processed and didn’t taste very good to her.
Although everyone thinks that she studied cheese-making, she hasn’t. Along the way she did spend some time learning the basics of plant-based cheese, but nobody taught her specifically how to make aged cheese.
Her impetus to start the business was her son, who wasn’t vegan. They were on a family trip and talking about veganism. She was explaining all the many reasons for becoming vegan – the animals, the environment, and our health – to her son. He told her that he could give up the meat and the eggs but thought that the cheese was just too difficult to give up. Since Amy has a background in plant-based nutrition, was able to explain to him about casin, the addictive property in cheese that is just like morphine and causes our brains to release dopamine. He told her if she could make great tasting vegan cheese, he would become vegan. So, her task was set!
She travelled a little, to France to see how they were making traditional cheese. She bought books and did a lot of trial and error at the beginning. She wanted to use activated nuts, and ferment them since fermented product is good for our gut microbiome. The aging process is also important to Amy. Putting them in the dehydrator does something similar, but it’s not quite the same. The flavor and texture is different with a truly aged cheese.
Comparing aged cheeses to aged wine, Amy explained how the flavor is intensified in the aging process. While noting that there are some good smaller cheesemakers in Hong Kong with delicious products, like there are great tasting young wines, there just is a complexity of flavor that sets apart an aged wine, and likewise she strives to achieve this same complexity in her cheeses.
Her cheese takes 24 days from activating the nuts to seeing the finished product. She must monitor the humidity and temperature, and she discovered that it’s a very technical process.
After hearing the stories of both Monica and Amy, it was a very special treat to taste the cheese and crackers together in one space. Just having access to the tasting of the two products now makes it easy to know what to order when we are feeling a snack attack!