Healthy alternative to cheese
Kees is a special ‘cheese’. Cheese in quotes, because by law it can’t be called cheese. It’s a healthy alternative prepared from skim milk and vegetable fats and contains 60 percent less saturated fat than 48+ cheese. We tasted Kees.
Regular cheese contains quite a bit of saturated fat and salt. Saturated fat raises the ‘bad’ cholesterol LDL. This cholesterol sticks to your artery walls and thus increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Salt in itself is not unhealthy, but you quickly get too much of it. People who are sensitive to it develop a higher blood pressure when eating salt. Salt is filtered in your body through your kidneys. If you eat salt very often, the kidneys are overloaded and that is not good for your heart.
Kees is an alternative to cheese. The product resembles cheese in appearance and structure, but the ingredients are slightly different. During the preparation, the animal fats from cow’s milk are completely replaced by vegetable oils. The main ingredients are skimmed milk and vegetable fats, such as sunflower oil and rapeseed oil. As a result, Kees contains 60 percent less saturated fat and 30 percent less salt than 48+ cheese. So healthier for your heart and blood vessels. Kees also means good news for vegetarians. Kees is made with vegetarian rennet and is therefore suitable for vegetarians.
How does it taste?
To be honest, I started the Kees test skeptical. Normally I avoid light cheeses and I prefer to top my sandwich with spicy, full-fat cheese. Not good for the line, but nice and creamy and full of flavour.
There are two varieties of Kees, matured and extra matured. The keesmakers gave me quite a few sample packs of both flavors and a few recipes, such as Kees wraps and Kees fondue. Kees can therefore not only eat a sandwich, you can also cook with it.
Unfortunately, because the cheeses arrive at the editorial office via the post and individually wrapped in plastic, they started to sweat a bit. Apart from that, Kees looks, smells and feels great, just like real cheese. The taste is also quite close and is quite spicy. The extra matured variety certainly tastes quite salty for a cheese with a low salt content. The structure appeals to me less, I find it on the dry, grainy side. Nice with an old cheese, but with a matured cheese I expected a bit more creaminess.
You can grate Kees just fine, it turns out. The product is not so hard that grating takes a lot of effort, but also not so soft that all the cheese sticks to the grater. Under the grill, Kees melts perfectly on the tried-and-true wraps. The result is a nice au gratin cheese crust.
Conclusion
Kees beats a comparison with previous light cheeses that I tasted brilliantly. It has more flavor and it melts a lot better too. But compared to regular, matured 48+ cheeses, Kees is a bit too dry and in my personal opinion not as tasty as real cheese. Something is missing, perhaps the creaminess of fatter cheeses. If you have to watch your cholesterol but miss the cheese on your sandwich, Kees is a nice alternative.
Kees is available at specialty cheese shops across the country.
