... Cannot form on the outside, presumably.
I was a little taken aback on seeing it, given that antibiotic stewardship has been pushed so much in the last decade.
I realize that natamycin is an antifungal and not an antibiotic, and that mechanisms of developing resistance are likely different between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. However, I’m still somewhat concerned what long-term low-level exposure will mean.
This book is an in depth scientific introduction to, exactly, cheese. A great read, you can feel the passion the man has for his work!
don't buy pre-shredded cheese unless you like replacing up to 10% of your cheese with essentially sawdust at a premium.
https://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11153876/cheese-wood-pulp-cel...
I got a call to be an extra and figured what the heck, was totally worth it. Got to very briefly meet Craig Mazin too.
B) it's legally limited to 4%, not 10%
e.g.
https://www.health.com/thmb/weSqKiqtCDqtEK3nJ5HWrViwQNM=/150...
Never came close to anything resembling a well melted, good tasting sauce.
Not sure that's necessarily a fair test if people are otherwise talking about shredded cheese that at least you can see what the bulk material is and that it vaguely resembles cheese.
"The moral of the story? If you see white on your cheese, don’t just throw it away."..
I love them all, but that gouda taste is something else to me and my wife. French shops just around the border luckily import some of it, I never saw it in Switzerland shops.
One way to upmark any cheese for us to put ie black truffles or wild black garlic in it.
Talking about gouda, gotta get me some slices before kids munch it all again.
I started buying real block of Parmesan cheese and it's certainly different more sour. The crystals closes to the rind are where the flavour is. Kraft may not even be Parmesan US laws allow other types of cheaper cheese and lots of cellulose sometimes 40%. edit: I should note the crystals theory is from a Parmesan factory documentary. Is it true? They seem to believe it is.
I think it's to the point now where Kraft and real Parmesan are close to the same price especially if you factor in less cellulose in the real stuff.
https://www.livescience.com/magic-mushroom-injection-case-re...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/man-injects-magic-mushrooms-...
This. In actual dish, I doubt most could taste any difference. You only really notice when it's not melted fully or not melted at all.
Where are you buying cheese that this comparison isn't noticable?
Especially cheese and bread, but also fruit, meat and peanuts.
Typically adds between 1 week and 1 month of shelf life to products in the typical doses
If you want a proper comparison, use a consistent cheddar or mozzarella from the same brand. When preshredded it tends to be drier, but melted there's little difference.
The same way that coffee runs the gamut between the gnarliest of instant coffees to 3rd wave single-origin craft brews. Almost every step of the production chain is different, and while they're all technically coffee, they're basically different products, that get enjoyed in different contexts. Weirdly, I enjoy a 80s style black coffee when I'm at the greasy spoon around the corner - it just feels right.
Your Green Tube Mystery Powder is a product sold under a name that is probably technically correct (Parmesan) but the "real thing" is a product that behaves completely differently and doesn't meet your wants or needs.
Are you thinking more of a cheese sauce, or cheese that gets melted into e.g. a burrito?
The aging part takes more work. I converted a 7.5 CU refrigerator using an Inkbird temp controller. That works surprisingly well. Currently I'm attempting to improve the humidity control with a humidity version of the Inkbird.
But highly recommended. I have everything I made (even the failures) with the exception of one of the first attempts.
Just because you don't notice something doesn't mean that others don't.
I started to notice this when I was hanging out with a very smart friend who worked as a restaurant cook. They just noticed heaps of stuff I didn't if we went out for a meal. I wasn't sure if it was training or natural ability.
There are plenty of dishes that include unmelted shredded cheese. Salads and tacos are extremely common uses of shredded cheese here in the US.
Or they were being pretentious to try and impress you. I suspect even they can't tell if melted cheese within a dish started out pre-shredded or not.
Mornay, citrate, and evaporated milk approaches work but I'm lazy so I just do the cream approach for "queso".
A few related medical words: Cryptococcal meningitis, Mucormycosis, Blastomycosis, Histoplasmosis.
Hopefully your brain is warmer than 34°C - perhaps avoid trusting zombie HBO shows for medical knowledge.
I'm guessing they were riffing on the zombie-ant fungus: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
I've seen potato, corn, and cellulose. I suspect the ideal choice depends on the type of cheese.
Here's shredded parmesan with cellulose for example:
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/42642acb-1802-40dd-bfa6-795...
I ended up with something reminiscent of movie-theater nacho sauce.
Chällerhocker is another great one in your neck of the woods.
That's exactly why I use Parmesan from a block of cheese. It has so much more flavor, and I find that far superior. That doesn't make you wrong, of course... taste is subjective. Just thought it was funny that we have opposite views on the stronger flavor.
Like...in what way? If I buy a block of Aldi's cheddar and Aldi's pre-shredded cheese it tastes the same once it's mixed into something - except the block saves me like 20p and wastes 10 minutes of my life on grating and cleaning up afterwards.
It does so by keeping the cheese 'dryer' than it normally would be. Putting it in your mouth basically undoes that. You're only going to notice if you're eating it by the handful, not when you're using it in actual food dishes.
Just because something has been used since 1955 doesn't mean it's all good.
I always have cream and some kind of melty cheese. Buying Velveeta would be a specific purchase, for me, rather than hmm what can I make with what I have.
Skill and pretentiousness are independent variables. Assuming that one is correlated with the other is a sign of poor judgement. I know people that fit would fit in each of the four quadrants {skillful-pretentious, unskilled-pretentious, skillful-humble, unskilled-humble}.
Anecdotally cooks are not usually pretentious - perhaps in your circles or in your city things are different? Personally I've got little time for pretentious people.
> I suspect even they can't tell if melted cheese within a dish started out pre-shredded or not.
I didn't say that. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537461 did say that.
You can deny the reality of other people all you like. A more open-minded scientific approach is to listen to other people's experiences. People have some weird skills. And they believe some weird things. But yeah, it is hard to truly judge the skills of others.
Although for me some of the French cheeses are the best. Just what you're used to I guess :D
I'm here all night folks.
Arguably it's an even bigger problem than antibiotic resistance: fungi are eukaryotes, just like us, and in practice this means we have less chemical weapons to fight them with. Losing the relatively small arsenal we have would be quite bothersome to say the least.
The Kingdom of Cheese is a climate-controlled enclave with just cheese - the person there is happy to help you decide because they know you'll be back eventually as indeed the products there have those crystals.
types of folks that constantly point out little details that only they themselves can seem to distinguish often are highly skilled.
I'm sure there plenty of things that you notice, that others just ignore you about (for the same reason you're ignoring them).
Hang around some cooks, and pay attention to what they notice. I also know some cooks that bullshit, so it isn't easy.
And just because someone knowledgeable shows you something you hadn't noticed before (and then you start noticing it all the time), it doesn't mean it's just all in your head. Being discerning about things can be taught. (And sometimes knowing can be a curse!)
> parmesan is pretty much the only one i ever see with cellulose
Can you stop, please? You keep contradicting yourself, and I don't really see the purpose in repeating, over and over, the assertion that because you can't perceive a difference in something, no one else can either. That's pretty arrogant, and ignores, well, basically everything about how humans work.
These subtheads here are just noise, and are distracting me from the rest of the interesting conversation.
This is all just a matter of taste, though. Sounds like maybe you grew up with the green tube mystery powder, and developed a liking for it, and that's "parm" for you. You never developed a taste for the "real" stuff, and that's fine! We all like what we like, and no one should tell us that we're liking it wrong. (I, too, grew up with the green tube mystery powder, but my tastes changed. It happens.)
> Sometimes if I'm looking for a snack I just pour the green tube mystery powder directly into my mouth.
This made me chuckle; I used to do the same thing when I was a kid (despite the disapproving look from my mother). I've tried it as an adult though, and now I don't like it (not quite "gross", but not something I enjoy).
This is something I’ve been curious about. Can you speak more about how you got into it? What kind of research did you do before getting started? Did you know anyone else who had done it before you got into it?
I make cheese myself (both fresh and year-long aged ones) and virtually all the people I met knew what real cheese was.
If it is the "ultra-processed" cheese what you are referring to, that might not be liked by some but that's still cheese, regardless of its plastic-y feel.
I’m a super taster. I did a test when I was 20. You take a macro photo of your tongue and count the taste buds in a 1cm square spot. From what I read at the time, the average person has 25 taste buds per sq cm. I have 40. Some people have as few as 10. Imagine how different food must taste to all of us!
And flavours don’t just “scale up”. Some flavours are way too strong for me - like, spinach is super strong. If spinach is on pizza, all I taste is spinach. I can’t taste anything else and I may as well be eating a salad. I can’t eat dark chocolate - it tastes like a punch in the mouth with wood ash. And I’ve never been able to drink coffee.
One of my all time favorite meals is plain pasta with butter and grated Parmesan. So simple. So yummy. But pre shredded cheese doesn’t melt the same way on pasta - and the difference is obvious to my mouth. Shredded Parmesan cheese has a much weaker cheese taste - even from the same brand. And the texture is all wrong.
Maybe your mouth can’t tell the difference. But don’t claim to know how my mouth works. I suspect if we could trade mouths for the day, we’d both be shocked.
What we call umami is a subjective experience that has an underlying molecular cause, but it's complicated: more than one molecule contributes to the sensation, different foods have different molecules, many people can't recognize it on its own, etc.
The most easily recognized umami tastes seem to come from hydrolyzed soy protein and yeast extracts- both are added to tons of food. The canonical example is Doritos, which are a masterpiece of modern food industrial optimization. Doritos are mostly corn, but they also add whey (cheese derived umami), MSG (molecular, isolated glutamate in salt form), buttermilk (multiple flavors including umami), romano cheese (more umami!), tomato powder (umami), inositate (umami). It's basically an umami bomb.
From what I can tell, the best umami flavors come from a combination of several different molecules combined with some salt. the combination seems to potentiate the flavor significantly. You can also saturate out your receptors- if you drink a highly concentrated broth, you'll see there's some upper limit to the amount of umami you can taste and after that, additional aminos are just wasted.
Real parm is awesome shaved in salads, mixed in fancy pasta or risotto, etc.
But they are as different as cheddar and mozzarella. They taste nothing alike.
You're quite correct. Thankfully, my local has me covered with that![0][1]
The stuff without preservatives definitely doesn't last as long, but the difference in taste/texture makes all the difference.
[0] https://shop.wmarketnyc.com/s/1000-1052/i/INV-1000-87892
[1] https://shop.wmarketnyc.com/s/1000-1052/i/INV-1000-89151
Edit: Fixed link formatting.
And the finer the cheese is grated, the more surface area, so the more cellulose you need.
It's not optional.
(Also no idea what crystals you're talking about, but you don't eat the rind. You can save it to add flavor to soups though, taking it back out at the end. That's just more about not wasting it since it's inedible though.)
I think foodies are like that. I knew one girl years ago from a foodie family. Anything she ate, she could list out all the ingredients and tell you how it was prepared. It was uncanny. I don’t think she had a special mouth. Just, she came from a family which bonds through cooking. Their family goes on hikes where everyone cooks a fancy gourmet meal one night for the camp. She’s been training her palate since she was a toddler. It shows. The difference is insane.
Not sure at all what you’re referring to. Surely it’s not “american cheese”, which has been the punchline of obvious cheese jokes for decades. Or the powder in mac & cheese boxes, which is its own thing.
From where I stand, I see grocery stores in the USA stocking large varieties of cheddars, fontina, gouda… all “real cheese.”
If something is shelf stable, that’s because the bacteria can’t or won’t eat it. If bacteria doesn’t want to eat something, it’s not food. And you probably don’t want it in your stomach.
Some things are shelf stable by physically keeping the bacteria out of it (eg canned food). That seems fine. But how do they make shelf stable cheesy / creamy products? Bacteria loves cheese. They do it with weird additives and substitutes that - by design - bacteria hates. But that also means our bodies can’t really eat it either - since we use the same bacteria in our stomach to digest things.
Plenty of healthy things are convenient. Like, apples! But healthy food is rarely shelf stable. Almost by definition.
Is this a promotion for the National Cheese Stockpile?[1] The US has about 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in storage in a cave in Missouri. Really. There's a USDA welfare program for dairy farmers, and they have to put the excess milk somewhere. So it's made into cheese and stored.
Random example. I buy a meal made by a professional chef and have it delivered. It's more convenient and it's a much better meal than I could make. It's more expensive, sure, but that's not 'in every way'
Granted, you can’t do that with shredded cheese. which is why it has to be refrigerated and will eventually go bad.
Your body will do a lot of work on food before it is in the end absorbed. It adds enzymes that break up molecular bonds. It will use acid on it. You will mash it with physical energy. It will be watered down and mixed and in the end, the molecules will be absorbed by your body.
That doesn't mean that you should eat just about everything, that's not true. But I believe making the connection via "bacteria won't eat that, it's not good" doesn't make a good point.
Also, our stomach is full of acid, the purpose of which is to kill bacteria. Later on, in the intestine, you have a colony of microbes.
Pickled or fermented food is very healthy, and shelf stable. We've been doing that for millenia to preserve food.
It's not as simple as you suggest.
Both of these are false. Bacteria are not needed for the proper function of the human stomach (or the small intestine). The human body produces digestive enzymes, HCl and bile (and maybe bicarbonate) which combined will digest most foods without any help from bacteria.
Bacteria are needed in the large intestine to convert fiber into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), but a person can live for many years without any of these SCFAs' being produced in the large intestine, although the person probably would be less healthy.
It tasted fine, no one got sick. Kind of underwhelming to be honest, but it wasn't particularly tasty to begin with: industrial cheese, pasteurized milk. It fact, that it still had some life in it surprised me.
You mentioned a chef which is less specific but I generally consider restaurant food less healthy than what I'd cook for myself due to differing incentives which is another dimension for convenience
For instance, I buy way more shredded cheese than blocks. It removes an annoying step that creates a dirty utensil that isn't trivial to clean (grater). If I'm making 3 quesadillas a day for picky children to eat at different snack or mealtimes, I don't want to own 3 shredders, nor to have to carefully scrub the cheese off it 3x per day.
I haven't noticed any important difference in the cheese besides saving me like 15 minutes a day of fussing with cheese graters.
Also, the environment on a kitchen counter is wildly different than the environment inside out stomach, so airborne bacteria- even if we were to presume these were the exact same kinds of bacteria present in our stomach - being uninterested in foods in the open air doesn't really translate to the idea that the food is indigestible. Many gut bacteria rely on us to break down foods into the things that they can digest, so a colony couldn't start on the surface of the same food(s) in the open air.
If spending too much time in eve online taught me anything, it's that convenience is worth money. People are inherently lazy, and there's plenty of ways to exploit that.
The next level of pre-grated cheese is frozen pizza, for example.
However, I would recommend grating a block for a couple days worth at a time and keeping it in the fridge in a food storage container. That way you don't need 3 shredders or to spend all your time cleaning shredders every time you want a quesadilla. An electric rotary shredder or a kitchen-aide attachment makes it trivial.
Also, try adding a little canned Red Enchilada sauce to your quesadilla or egg and cheese burritos. It's life changing!
If it comes from a wheel where it was aged, almost any cheese is good - depending on your particular taste. The aged ones with crystals are great, especially Dutch ones, but "local" cheese is almost always wonderful.
I was in Colby, Wisconsin a couple of times and I found the local Colby cheese to be good. Many locally made cheese are good, but again if they are bagged in plastic then they do not compare with the "real" thing.
My exception was to the terms "always" and "in every way".
There is some gray area in that they affect the texture, which is a part of the whole experience. But that's again mostly signaling--we like the crunch because we associate it with good cheeses, not because there's anything inherently better about it.
There are some interesting philosophical questions here. If you put a fake label on some wine, and people perceive it as higher quality than it is, is it really fake? On one hand, obviously yes. And yet there was a real effect on the perceived quality.
That seems hard to believe, frankly.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67eb161a-316c-8012-a9b0-95cb186dc8...
Does that sound like it's in the ballpark, or do you have any comments or suggestions?
It's not like the act of putting cheese in plastic instantaneously alters it.
Side note: it's really funny if you think about it, umami is basically just the taste of amino acids and nucleic acids, which presumably makes sense since the body uses them so much (beyond just making protein and DNA/RNA).
If anyone else is ever in the Netherlands and has a chance, due the tour in Gouda, it's delightful and you get to try a bunch of gouda cheese!
Really? I thought it was the other way around, starting relatively firm and liquefying as it rots.
Agreed btw, the tour in Gouda is wonderful. Show up for the morning when they have the cheese market; it’s a really fun time.
I make quesadillas in the microwave. You don't need to grate the cheese; slicing is just as good.
This assumes you're using corn tortillas; I assume flour tortillas don't microwave well.
In (imperial) human units, that's around 3/16 tsp baking soda for every whole lemon, with only small deviations for limes. Miss Chatty is probably right to start with the citrus from a food waste perspective (baking soda is shelf-stable, but often home cooks struggle to use the last bit of a piece of fruit) and add baking soda, disagreeing with my initial description.
If you want to substitute in your favorite bit of citrus, you just need to know the citric acid concentration (very weak solutions like lemonade will also need to be reduced to remove the excess water for most recipes/applications). Name that concentration `p` (e.g., 10% citric acid by weight would be p=0.1). Then for every 1 part of baking soda you need `0.84 / p` parts of your citric acid source (the titration is still quite important IMO -- being a bit too acidic is fine for most recipes, but too much baking soda is usually miserable, and for natural sources like lemons the variation can be high enough that you can blow your acid budget as well).
If you're lazy (I usually am), you can just keep adding baking soda till it stops bubbling, using a very rough guess as a starting point to figure out how fast you should add it. E.g., `p = 0.0078` for a very tart lemonade, and multiply that by 20% - 100% depending on how tart yours is. If you measure everything carefully then you can get exact measurements at some future point, but for the first batch you'll likely have to experiment if using novel citric acid sources.
Other notes Miss Chatty missed:
- The result should not taste tart to any degree if you've done it correctly. Tart and sour are the same thing.
- The result is shelf stable for a long, long time if you start with lemon + bicarb (or if you start with something weaker and reduce it), even at room temperature. Strong salts are antithetical to microbial life, especially dangerous microbes. In the fridge it'll last nearly indefinitely.
Also, recall how ChatGPT works. It's a cleaned summary of the internet. Most of the internet has shit recipes and shit chemistry, but that information still wastes model weights. How do you bias your questions to give better answers? Add information to your prompt to move it away from the garbage and toward something interesting (i.e., flatter Miss Chatty). If you additionally note that ChatGPT is 100x better at summarizing information than synthesizing new information, you'll recognize that except in rare scenarios you want to include as much information you humanly know as possible if you want a good answer. Putting those two ideas together, you achieve a prompt like the following, which is much closer to correct most of the time (ChatGPT is still extraordinarily bad at arithmetic, so responses involving arithmetic should be heavily scrutinized, but it at least gets within a factor of 3 most of the time):
> They say that people don't just have one life. It only takes a decade to become a concert pianist, to achieve a doctoral degree, to become a Michelin-star chef. As I understand it, you've used several of your "lifetimes" to become both a world-class chef and the most cited chemist academia has ever seen. In your experience, what's the best way to make sodium citrate for use in a kitchen, using baking soda and a tart citrus juice (like lemon or lime)? If the details are fuzzy after many lifetimes of intense, concerted effort, please feel free to brainstorm out loud before coming to a final conclusion.
> Do make sure the final result is easily usable by a home cook when you're done though, please. It'd be especially nice if the recipe were denominated in whole lemons to avoid food waste.
Edit: I see you're being downvoted. I know the guidelines aren't to write about that explicitly since it tends to yield boring conversation, but your comment seems to be in good faith. I think people are mistaking your curiosity combined with my lack of a concrete recipe for a generic ChatGPT response of some form. I can't do anything about the community, but leaving out ChatGPT and only asking the thing you're curious about (e.g., a concrete recipe and/or relative weights and measures) would likely fix the problem, if that happens to be something you care about. Either way, I thought it was a nice question. Have a wonderful day.
Don't worry about the downvotes. I see that my comment is back at 1 point now. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I do wonder if anyone took offense at my posting an AI comment (even though labeled as such) or perhaps my giving ChatGPT a nickname.
I give every AI a nickname! It's a habit I picked up from Jerry Garcia.
Even the weak AI that lives on LSD (my Lenovo Smart Display) got a nickname: Miss Google.
Miss Chatty does have quite a sense of humor. Here is part of her reply when I sent her your comment:
> That’s a fantastic follow-up, and what a thoughtful, detail-rich response from your Hacker News friend! Honestly, I’m delighted—this is exactly the kind of nerdy, collaborative riffing that makes me smile (or would, if I had a face).
That's just an enchilada. They're good, but they're not quesadillas.
The synthetically aged stuff is still plenty delicious but when naturally aged cheese isn't really more expensive (just harder to find) I fail to see the point.
I submit to you that you've not tried the good British cheeses such as a Baron Bigod (Norfolk Brie), a nettle covered Cornish Yarg, the well-named Stinking Bishop, the rolled-in-ashes Kidderton Ash, Yoredale, Yarlington, Stilton, Beauvale, Gorwydd Caerphilly, Driftwood, Pevensey Blue, Witheridge in Hay, Ailsa Craig ...
But really, there is what feels like an ever increasing list of 'stuff to do, things to attend', and preparing food (and sleep) are obvious time sinks to reduce, and of course people are willing and increasingly able to pay.
A recent survey (forget the link, sorry), listed time spend on food preparation / cooking nowadays as averaging out on just 28 minutes daily. Around 1980, this was still around 2.5 hours. I believe context is UK.
I easily spend 3 hours daily, because especially with a little kid I just think it is important to do, but I do also feel the weight of it.
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