Vegan Sour Cream

Our homemade vegan sour cream uses cashews, miso, and lemon juice to recreate the flavors of a traditional sour cream. It's easy to make in a blender, spreadable, and totally dairy free!

This post is sponsored by Zwilling. All opinions are our own. This post also contains affiliate links, which means that Crowded Kitchen may make a small commission when you purchase products at no additional cost to you.

Jump to:

• 🥯 Why We Love This Recipe
• 🍋 Ingredients
• 📋 Ingredient Notes
• 🍴Equipment
• 🔪 Step-by-step Instructions
• 💭 Expert Tips and FAQs
• 🍽  Related Recipes
• 📖 Recipe

🥯 Why We Love This Recipe

• Passive prep: We love that this recipe is so easy to pull together. Once you soak the cashews, it only requires about 3 minutes of real work to pull together. Essentially, you just soak the cashews and add them to the blender with the rest of the ingredients!
• Tangy and creamy: Soaked cashews add a spreadable, creamy texture, and miso and lemon juice team up to help recreate that trademark sour cream tanginess.
• Versatile: you can use this vegan sour cream plain as a spread, dip or topping for soups/chilis, fritters, nachos and more, or use it in recipes like tahini pasta, caramelized onion dip or stroganoff. You can even add in different flavorings, like avocado, cilantro and lime juice, for a quick vegan crema for tacos.

🍋 Ingredients

Here's what you'll need to make this vegan sour cream:

📋 Ingredient Notes

• Be sure to use unroasted (raw), unsalted cashews. Extra salt will throw off the balance of the recipe, while roasted cashews will not soak as well as raw cashews and will change the taste. The cashews are used for texture, not flavor in this context. When soaked, they make for a super creamy, thick, rich base that's delicious in vegan sauces, dips and desserts (like cheesecake and ice cream!).
• We used white miso in this recipe. White miso is the mildest and sweetest miso variety. (The name is a bit deceptive – it's not really white, but the lightest in color when it comes to miso varieties!) As the color of the miso darkens, the flavor intensifies and the salt content increases. If you can't find any white miso, yellow miso is a perfectly fine substitute. We wouldn't sub in red miso in this recipe, which has a more intense flavor and may change the taste of this vegan sour cream.
• Using fresh lemon juice will go a long way towards balancing out the flavors in this recipe, and giving the sour cream a bit of much-needed tanginess to replicate its dairy-containing counterpart.
• Feel free to sub olive oil with another neutral oil of choice. It's just used here for emulsification, which makes for a super creamy mixture.

🍴Equipment

Sometimes, you really need a full size blender. But in most cases, you're making a smoothie that fills the blender up a quarter or a third of the way. Or you're making a dip, a dressing, or a homemade nut butter.

If you use a full size blender, you have to contend with lids, extra surface area to clean, and a big blender soaking up valuable counter space.

In our house, our Zwilling Enfinigy Personal blender has taken over as our most-used kitchen appliance, thanks to its convenient small size and ease of use! The beauty of the Enfinigy lies in its smart design and simplicity.

We also have their regular 64 oz. Enfinigy Power Blender and use it all the time for larger batches of recipes, like a puréed soup or an extra large batch of homemade hummus. But most of the time, it's just easier to use the personal size!

Just fill up the 20 oz. BPA free jar (it looks just like one of those protein shaker bottles!) with your ingredients, screw on the blade, place on the base, and blend or pulse!

Best of all, thanks to the included screw-on lid, the jar doubles as an on-the-go drinking container (perfect for your morning smoothie).

It's absolutely perfect for blending smaller quantities of ingredients, like our vegan sour cream! It's also great for other dips, sauces and homemade dressings.

It really shines when making smoothies; since the body of the blender doubles as the drinking container, there's only one dirty dish instead of two. Better yet, since the blades are separate from the body of the blender, they're much, much easier to clean. Even better, the jar is dishwasher safe!

🔪 Step-by-step Instructions

(1) Soak cashews in room temperature water for 2 to 3 hours.

(2) When the cashews are done soaking, drain them and give a quick rinse. Add the soaked cashews, water, lemon juice, olive oil, and miso to a blender and blend until smooth and creamy. It may take a minute or two to achieve your desired consistency.

💭 Expert Tips and FAQs

• The key to this recipe is making sure that the cashews are soaked thoroughly. They will soften up significantly and lend a creamy texture to the sour cream. For best results, soak in room temperature (not cold!) water for 2-3 hours (or up to 4-6 if you have time). If you're short on time, you can soak them in super hot water for at least an hour, but the longer, the better.
• Use raw, unsalted and unroasted cashews.
• It may take 1-2 minutes, or repeated blendings, to achieve a creamy consistency, so be patient! The longer your cashews soak, the faster they'll break down. The end result should be completely smooth and there shouldn't be any large cashew pieces.
• Storage: store in an airtight container for up to a week in the refrigerator.

🍽  Related Recipes

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📖 Recipe