Vegan Rose Sauce (Dairy-Free)

How do you make a creamy vegan sauce?

The most important ingredient in any creamy sauces is - cashews! You’ll see these in

Sour Creams

, Cream Cheese, Creams, and creamy sauces. Cashews have a way of liquefying into the perfect cream replacer.

How should you prepare your cashews?

If you are planning on making any cream based meal with cashews, you will get the best results by soaking the cashews. The best way is to soak them overnight in cool water. For a quick and dirty method, we’ve found success by soaking cashews in boiling water for an hour and even blending them raw can work in a pinch but is not recommended. 

How to make cashew cream?

The general process to make a cashew cream is to blend your cashews in a high speed blender with the help of some liquid. This can be water, which is most commonly used, but don’t be afraid to use an unsweetened plant-based milk to make it extra creamy. You could use oat milk, coconut milk, almond milk, hemp milk, or even cashew milk. What you use will ultimately depend on the flavor profile you are trying to achieve. Feel free to experiment.

For the blender, we will be using a Vitamix E310. This is a great quality and great value for higher end consumer blenders. If you’re looking into getting a new blender to up your plant-based diet, check out our review of the

best blenders for 2021.

The right cashew to liquid ratio?

This will depend on the thickness you want out of your cream and what you are using to liquefy your cashews. For this recipe we will want to use a 1:¾ ratio. This will give us a very pourable cream for our sauce. For thicker saucers all you have to do is reduce the amount of liquid. For very thick sauces, blenders start to have trouble as the mixture will stick to the sides if it is too thick. This will just require a little more time and effort.

How to make a dairy-free rose sauce?

The only extra step in this dairy-free version is creating your cashew cream. The first step is to sauté your onions, garlic, and herbs. Once those have started to brown you can add your tomatoes. In this case we used a 20 oz. can of tomatoes and supplemented the rest. 

While this simmers you can make your cashew cream. The cashews should liquify within a couple of minutes on a high setting. After this is done you can pour this into a container for later.

After the tomato mixture has simmered for 10 minutes, you can pour it into a clean blender container. Then you can pulse the blender until you have your desired consistency. You can decide here, whether you want a super smooth sauce, or maintain some of the tomato texture.

After blending, you will pour the mixture back into a pan to simmer for another 15 minutes. After this, you can add the cashew cream and mix to finish your rose sauce.