I’ve been thinking about this recently since I’ve been making a lot of pasta and I actually prefer the taste of Kraft parmesan cheese on a lot of things over the “real” parmigiano reggiano especially when it’s used as a topping eg. ceasar salad and pasta. I find that parmigiano reggiano has way too strong of a flavor and it clashes too much when eaten with other things.
Posted this in the right place, that’s quite an c/unpopularopinion. The only better place to post it would’ve been c/wrongopinion
Or /c/italia if the OP wants to start WW3.
Never underestimate the power of monosodic glutamate…
I checked the ingredient list just to be sure but it definitely doesn’t list MSG on it. (Also I think it would be very obvious if it contained MSG as the flavor of MSG is not exactly subtle).
Parmesan cheese contains the highest amount of MSG of any natural (i.e. excluding soy sauce, fish sauce, etc.) food. Tomatoes are next, I think.
It’s possible that Kraft has concentrated the natural msg, so it wouldn’t show up in the list of ingredients because it wasn’t added.
natural
I feel like we’re going on a bit of a weird limb if we’re calling cheese a natural food, especially if the yard stick we’re measuring it against is soy and fish sauce
Cheese is, after all, pretty much one of the OG processed foods. Wild cheeses don’t roam the plains to be hunted and slaughtered, it doesn’t grow on cheese trees (treese?) and if your cow is squirting cheese out of its udders, you’ve got a very sick cow. You gotta take a natural product (milk) and go through a whole process to make cheese.
To make cheese like Parmesan, you’re taking milk, inoculating it with bacteria, adding rennet and salt, heating it, separating the curds from the whey, forming it into a shape, and letting it age (I believe in that order, but I’m a foodie, not a cheese maker)
Compared to soy and fish sauce, where at the most basic level the process is basically put soy beans or fish in a container with salt, maybe some water, and let it sit, then strain out the parts that aren’t sauce.
Now of course there’s a lot of different types of cheeses, some have more or less complicated manufacturing processes with different ingredients, and the same goes for soy and fish sauces, there’s a whole lot of grey area where you can argue which ones are more processed or natural than others.
If you were to leave a bucket of milk, and a bucket of fish in some seawater out and forget about them for a few months, you’re probably more likely to have something that resembles fish sauce in the fish bucket than you are to have something resembling parmesan cheese in the milk bucket (though realistically, in either case your probably going to end up with a bucket of smelly sludge and mold in both of them)
And for the record before anyone accuses me of being disingenuous, I’m certain that every bottle of soy or fish sauce you’ve ever seen lists more than 3 ingredients and probably went through at least a few more steps in the manufacturing than I laid out. Fish and soy sauces are more of a broad category, what I described is pretty much the bare minimum you need to do to make something you could reasonably call a fish sauce or a soy sauce. Parmesan cheese is much more specific type of product, if you’re skipping steps or doing things significantly differently, you might be making cheese but you’re not making Parmesan.
It’s kind of weird to think about, but in a certain sense, all three products aren’t actually all that different from each other. You take a base ingredient (milk, beans, or fish) add salt and maybe some other stuff (water, rennet, maybe some other ingredients) and then let bacteria do its thing and wait until it goes so bad it’s good.
Couple recommendations on youtube off the top of my head for anyone curious, I know that Townsends did at least one cheese-making episode, and Tasting History made Garum, which was a type of fish sauce popular in ancient Rome.
And tangentially related, since we mentioned tomatoes, ketchup was basically Europeans’ attempt at making Asian style fish or soy sauces (usually without actually using fish or soy) and it’s only fairly recently that we even settled on tomatoes as being the default ketchup, there were a whole lot of different types of sauces and condiments that used to be called ketchup. Worcestershire sauce, which is actually a fish sauce, is in that same lineage as well. There is a whole lot of weird ketchup history for anyone who really wants to go down that rabbit hole, and I’m pretty sure both of those channels I mentioned have done a couple episodes each that cover at least parts of it.
Someone has to bring that back: I would spend money testing a line of ketchups that aren’t “ketchup”. At this point they’ve lost me as a ketchup customer, and I can’t be the only one, so let’s gentrify, let’s turn it into a thing, let’s look back for all the cool retro-ketchups
Edit: consider the large variety of mustards, hot sauce, barbecue sauce in any grocery: why is there only one type of ketchup?
The only ketchup I bought this year is “curry ketchup” and that is not carried anywhere locally that I’ve found
You can find Geo. Watkins mushroom ketchup online, and if you look around in ethnic food stores you can occasionally find some fruit ketchups, banana ketchup is fairly easy to find, I also once bought a bag (it came in a bag, not a bottle or jar, which is what caught my eye) of “ketchup type sauce” that listed papaya as the first ingredient (it tasted very much like ketchup, I could tell it wasn’t regular Heinz brand ketchup, but if I hadn’t read the packaging it probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it was anything besides tomato ketchup)
At one point ketchup was more of a catch-all term for a lot of different types of sauces and condiments, we’d probably actually have more luck bringing them back if we called thew them things like “fermented mushroom sauce” instead of ketchup, because a lot of them had little to nothing in common with modern ketchup, the Geo Watkins ketchup I mentioned, is closer to Worcestershire sauce than anything we’d usually call ketchup today.
Sometimes MSG it’s writed with alternative names, since in some places it got banned as MSG corps have been avoiding it just writing undercover names.
Still, I’m almost positive it’s not in the Kraft parm. Like I said in the text, I don’t like it because its more flavorful or anything. I like it because it’s bland lmao.
Good point, never tried DOP Parm, but tbh I am not Italian so I am not so much into pastas, anyway Kraft Parm taste good for me too 👍👍.
Try grana padano. It has a similar taste as Kraft parmesan.
I don’t know on what country/area of the world you are, maybe the two products aren’t equally available or have different prices.
Here in Italy, Grana Padano has a slightly lower price than Parmigiano Reggiano, and they are equally available generally in big and small distribution stores.
I like grana much more than parmigiano because it has a more delicate taste. The latter has a higher fat percentage and you feel that “greasy” taste which not everyone likes.
The price difference is due to stricter regulations in the parmigiano specification which should result in a more qualitative product (not only grass feed cattle but also from very specific regions, milk can be collected just once a day, no preservatives are allowed whatsoever, etc.).
Do you prefer fake cheddar over real cheddar too? Because I feel like a good mature cheddar has comparable taste strength to parmigiano.
Honestly depending on the food, yeah. For instance a hamburger where the meat is supposed to be the star of the show, definitely.
How about fake syrup vs. real maple?
Fake maple syrup if all you want is sugar. Real if you want more depth. I can see some people not liking real because real syrup is more bitter and bitter isn’t a popular flavor.
correct. maybe it’s the nostalgia, my ruined american taste buds, the cellulose, but it’s delicious. proper cheese is too expensive and you have to get the grater out and grate it then wash the grater and …
I’ve been getting shaved Parmesan and could never go back, but it definitely is a stronger flavor (that’s one of the reasons I like it).
However you could also try other cheeses or form factors.
- I recently picked up shaved Asiago for something else, and my kids appreciated the less strong flavor.
- “shaved” is a great form factor because of how well it melts, but you could get “shredded” any cheese, or make your own. I used to use shredded mozzarella: great melting and you can’t get more mild than that
Edit: may not be DOP, but is real cheese, no sawdust
I tried it all. I tried shaved, I tried shredded and I tried grated, and I didn’t like any of it. Shredded was probably my favorite because it distributes the Parm a lot more evenly since the pieces are super tiny, but the flavor is still too strong in my opinion.
I don’t know what this Kraft thingamabob tastes like, but I recently tried this soy-based parmesan-like topping and well, it certainly tastes different from parmigiano reggiano and it doesn’t taste perfect, but I don’t either think that parmigiano reggiano tastes perfect, so I’m kind of undecided, taste-wise.
Parmigiano reggiano just has this pungent rennet taste, which means you can only use it in homeopathic doses…
Parmigiano reggiano just has this pungent rennet taste, which means you can only use it in homeopathic doses.
Half of my plate of pasta is parm or other hard Italian cheese so to each of their own I guess
you can only use it in homeopathic doses…
Yeah, that is the intended use case for many strongly flavored cheeses: a little goes a long way. There’s still dieting info that recommends feta or extra sharp cheddar or Gorgonzola, for exactly this reason. Even though it tends to have higher fat content, you can get the flavor with a small amount and eat lower fat overall
We use both, for different things. I love, love real Parmesan (like will go stand at the display and smell it even if not buying) but there are some good applications for the dry shaky cheese, too.
Cesar salad though? Absolutely not. The shaved Parmesan is better, the shake on cheese is gritty and unpleasant on that.
If you want something real with less strong flavour, try Grana Padano.
Yeah I can take a look the next time I make pasta.
Mkay
Obviously you can do whatever you want with your own food, but surely if you’re finding parmesan too strong then the solution is to just use a bit less parmesan?
No because then I won’t have enough Parm to spread it out. Using kraft Parmesan allows me to spread the Parm evenly so every bit has a good amount of Parm in it. If I only add a tiny amount of Parm then it’s very likely I won’t taste it much at all.
