I actually did this yesterday to a block of cheese and now I regret it

Fair enough! I just meant they’d have to stick it on the label or something, since you wouldn’t be to able to obviously tell the difference just by looking at it, that’s all.

This comment reminds me of Monty Python cheese shop sketch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz1JWzyvv8A

I'm saving this comment just so I know what cheese to try next time

But the crunchy bits on the outside are cheese mites, not crystals. (Seriously.)

Fun! I've never let it come that far. Was it somehow fuzzy or really like the firm, white skin that it has when you buy it?

Yes somewhat, but try to keep the 'h' to a minimum and extend the 'g' like you're gargling. :-)

Yes!

Say it. Say "chowda"

I've had most Dutch cheeses, and my personal favorite is smeerkaas, in the little gold cups.

Meant to say specifically Wilde Weide. L'amuse sells good cheese in general though.

https://boerderijdeeenzaamheid.nl/

Its not laziness, its just a matter of priority. Like playing eve online, or doing nothing.

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.

We always have blocks of hard cheese and cheddars in the fridge and I feel fine cutting off any moldy bits. With the shredded stuff, I'll forget about it and we end up binning lots since its impossible to tease out the bad from the good.

Funny, the same US that is in a stupid trade war where dairy is one of the disputed areas, is doing absurd subsidies of dairy. What an incongruous set of policies.

You can't really buy "Government Cheese." It used to be given out as part of food assistance programs in the US. I guess it was pretty okay cheese too. I think it's mostly given out as food assistance to other countries now since we moved over to SNAP debit cards.

I know you put it in quotes, but only about 50% of sawdust is cellulose. The remainder is hemicellulose, lignin, resins, and oils. Some shredded cheese use pure cellulose as an anti-caking agent, not sawdust.

Is "fake" really the right word here if people get the flavor, nutrition, and texture they want? I don't really give a damn if they figured out a way to bypass aging to achieve this.

The G in MSG is glutamate, so not an "also"... as its been covered by OP.

While I don't doubt that getting fresh cheese cut from the wheel is optimal, cheese bagged in plastic hasn't been "treated" to increase shelf life besides being put in plastic - which presumably also preserves the cheese at its existing humidity.

It's not like the act of putting cheese in plastic instantaneously alters it.

one of my pet peeves is "Gouda" puns that rely on it being pronounced like "good-er"

When you're re-watching the first episode of the first season, look out for the bearded guy in the map room with Merle Dandridge that's upset because everyone died, that's me. :)

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.

Cellulose is not "wood pulp" or "sawdust." Only about 50% of sawdust is cellulose. The rest is hemicellulose, lignin, resins, and oils. Any plant material that you eat contains cellulose. It's just about the most benign thing you could add to food as an anti-caking agent. ...not matter what the eater.com article with the attention grabbing headline that you linked to might say.

Cellulose is literally not sawdust. It could be made from sawdust, but would be heavily processed and refined, removing lignin/etc.

A) Sometimes it's cellulose - corn starch and other anti-caking agents are also used

B) it's legally limited to 4%, not 10%

Nope, the shredded cheese I buy uses potato starch. And it's definitely a trace amount, not 10%.

Yeah, not much seems to happen to Brie - it stays fairly mild. Unlike Camembert, which gets significantly stronger and runnier over time.

> It just turns into a firmer cheese by then

Really? I thought it was the other way around, starting relatively firm and liquefying as it rots.

Very intense fungicides are sprayed all over these places already. Though most of them break down in sunlight and rain after a couple days.

My partner read a book on food recently. They made an obvious point I’d never thought of before: Food is eaten in our stomachs by bacteria. If the bacteria in our stomachs can’t (or won’t) eat something, that means it’s not digestible. That means it’s not food.

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.

bananas are a socioeconomic catastrophe

Agreed. I went down this rabbit hole last year, going as far as even buying sodium citrate that's supposed to help it melt together, with mixed results and awful taste.

Never came close to anything resembling a well melted, good tasting sauce.

Pre-shredded cheese melts just fine, although I've never tried it in a straight cheese sauce (for those I just dice a block of cheese because it's easy and cheaper). But I use it in things like lasagna or other casserole type dishes, and I've never had an issue with its ability to melt properly.

No

Gut bacteria in the large intestine are generally considered (including by me) important for human health although again you would not starve to death or die of malnutrition if they all went away because the vast majority of the calories a person in the developed world gets are from foods that bacteria is not needed at all to digest and make use of those calories. Our ancestors 1000s of years ago however probably went through lean periods in which most of their nutrition came from very fibrous plant material with very little starches and free sugars in them, and in that situation, the calories from the SCFAs produced by gut bacteria might have often made the difference between survival and starving to death.

The ratios are way way way off. For pure citric acid and bicarb you want something like 45.7% citric acid by weight. Lemon juice is only around 3.9% citric acid, and lime juice is only around 3.7% by weight, so the desired proportions are around 21.6 parts lemon (or 23.5 parts lime) to 1 part bicarb. Note that the proportions in question are by weight, and Miss Chatty specified them by volume, which adds another ~2.2x multiplier. You want 47.5 parts lemon (or 51.7 parts lime) to 1 part bicarb by volume.

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.

If you like Velveeta I guess. I can't stand it and prefer to use whatever melty cheese I have on hand.

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.

Melt together some velveeta and a salsa for a pretty good cheese dip

Velveta on its own is pretty rough (imo), but if you start adding anything to it, it helps a lot. Like salsa is the easy one.

With the caveat that the ways it's "worse" can easily be irrelevant compared to the 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.

Definitely not "always" and "in every way".

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'

I dunno, to be pedantic, cheese is a convenient version of milk. I like both though.

Restaurants are usually better than home cooking. However, I have rarely found the more convenient option to be cheaper and it is usually worse. It's a bit of an iron triangle. Cheap, convenient, good.

A hotdog is a sandwich?

Would you really call it pedantry to object to someone saying "for an even better cheese pizza, try sprinkling pepperoni over the top"?

That's actually crazy to me. Like, a sealed, generic brand bag from the cold section of a chain grocery store vs a block purchased from the deli and shredded by hand? The difference is massive! Taste will vary between the two anyways but the texture difference is categorical. The pre shredded has grainy flour like stuff all over it, the manually shredded is completely smooth with no graininess at all. I can 1000% tell the difference in any kind of test you want to do.

Where are you buying cheese that this comparison isn't noticable?

Are you buying cheese that's shredded at the deli or something? The processed stuff in the bag seems to be plainly noticeable to me...

e.g.

https://www.health.com/thmb/weSqKiqtCDqtEK3nJ5HWrViwQNM=/150...

I typically find the anticaking agents are very obvious, you can often feel them with your fingers and see them in the appearance of the product.

I dont know if I can tell on taste but the difference in mouth feel is huge. The shredded version has wood dust on it to keep it from sticking and you can definitely feel it against the cheese in the mouth vs much more smooth/liable to clump together hand shredded off the block cheese.

>People are super religious about this but I've never been able to tell pre-shredded cheese from cheese I've shredded myself and I don't think anyone else can tell the difference in a blind taste test.

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.

Pre-shredded cheese is much, much dryer than cheese you grate yourself. Unless the only cheese you ever eat is already dry, like a parmesan, it should be trivial to notice the difference.

Perhaps the best example is parmesan. You should buy a small brick and shred it, then compare to the Kraft tube we all know -- the difference is massive.

taste is subjective, so I won't argue that point (although I do disagree with it), however if you're going to melt the cheese, it's very easy to tell the difference side by side.

Well, I can't tell personally, but good on OP for being able to tell.

Totally agree. Green tube powder is awesome on cheap pizza and cheap pasta.

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.

My family eats a lot of shredded cheese, pre and home shredded, I've never noticed in anything melted nor in anything where it's only half melted like tacos. Any graininess that might be present would be far offset by the other ingredients, but honestly I've never tasted any graininess. The anticaking stuff isn't even grainy, so why would the resulting cheese be grainy? You can lick a piece of pre-shredded cheese and the anticaking stuff flavorlessly dissolves in your mouth. I honestly believe most of this "graininess" is imagined after people read about it on the internet or hear about it from cooking shows. People have convinced themselves that cellulose = wood (notice it's mentioned in this thread several times) and somehow lose the ability to critically think about it. While cellulose is an anticaking agent, I don't think I've ever seen it used for cheese. Typically you see cheese using a modified corn starch. The anti-caking agent can cause some issues if you're making cheese sauces specifically, but generally if you're making a cheese sauce you're mixing in other ingredients and then dumping it over macaroni or potatoes or something anyway and it won't matter.

Training is massive for our senses. I’ve been learning the piano lately and I’m starting to notice I’m getting more information from listening to music. It’s really weird - like, I’ll play an old piece I’ve listened to a thousand times. But now I can separate out the different parts of the song in my head now. It’s obvious - how could I not have heard it before?

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.

>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.

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.

Sure, and I also doubt people's ability to tell the difference in a blind taste comparison. People claiming to do so visually see the anti-caking agent, they don't taste it. It doesn't taste grainy. You can taste a bit of corn starch or cellulose directly and tell that it doesn't taste 'grainy' or even have much of a flavor at all.

> > While cellulose is an anticaking agent, I don't think I've ever seen it used for cheese.

> 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.

You seem very certain that you know how my mouth works. I promise you, you don’t.

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.

> It does so by keeping the cheese 'dryer' than it normally would be. Putting it in your mouth basically undoes that.

By this logic, shouldn't croutons and cubes of fresh bread be indistinguishable?

> It does so by keeping the cheese 'dryer' than it normally would be. Putting it in your mouth basically undoes that.

That's not how chemistry works.

You've just made the the mistake I complained about. Let me edit your statement:

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.