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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

OT, but I just have to say, as someone who buys "Parmesan" cheese that typically hails from Wisconsin, there is just no comparison with legit Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's the same with "Gruyere" and Gruyère -- a wholly unique cheese with a depth of flavor and character that is just inimitable, no matter how good or faithful the imitation may be.

That being said, I'm not ashamed at all to say that the Parmesan I use most is the $4 wedge from Aldi.

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My most common consumption method for Parmigiano-Reggiano is standing in front of my fridge at 2am breaking chunks off the wedge, with a squeeze bottle of honey and whatever berries I have on hand. Can recommend.

You absolute degenerate.

That sounds delicious.

Boris, is that you? Get to work!

Try dunking it into truffled honey.

Eating large chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano off of a large wheel is AMAZING.

buying the wedge with the rind is a treat. when you get to the end you can break off a piece and gnaw on it all day at work like a dogs bone

A lot of cheeses benefit from very thin slicing - it emphasizes the crystallization of Parmigiano Regiano, the creaminess of a Havarti, or the everything of an Applewood smoked cheddar.

One thing I miss about my old place in the city was the ridiculously expensive market on my block that carried all of the "real" cheese. The real stuff was so fantastic and flavorful that I usually used far less of it, which partially offset the cost.

I also got a $20 jar of pasta sauce there once. I was embarrassed at how much I paid and didn't tell my wife. After her first taste, her reaction was "OMG, what is this? It's so good!". I took a taste and was blown away. Literally every taste just amazed me, so we kept getting it. I only recognized it by the label and never learned the brand, much to my chagrin (and my wallet's delight) when I moved away and never found it again.

Pianogrillo?

This was in the mid-2000's, so my memory is pretty fuzzy. I'll definitely check that brand out, though.

If you can get good canned tomatoes (I like the Flora brand San Marzano D.O.P, about $5.50 for a 28oz can), this is a great 20 minute recipe that will usually beat any pre-made sauce: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara...

Canned tomatoes? Yikes. If you’re trying to beat premise sauces at least get some local fresh tomatoes and have a go and making it from scratch. The acidic flavour of canned tomatoes is horrible in my opinion compared to fresh tomatoes.

For the ~1 month I have access to local fresh tomatoes, I'm going to be eating them in fresh preparations like caprese salad, BLTs, etc. rather than using them on sauces. The remaining 11 months of the year, canned tomatoes are just fine.

I think this is a smart move. Your examples are cases where fresh tomatoes outperform canned. Sauces, not so much

Fresh tomatoes are Usally pretty bland 11 months of the year. So canned is the way to go because they are ripe when canned and retain most of the flavors

You seem to mean off-season where you're saying fresh.

They are red they look like tomatoes they just taste like nothing that’s what I mean. Those are available most of the time the other kind almost never

I know what you mean. I get to eat really good tomatoes every few years, and just for a few days, then they are gone.

The good stuff spoils pretty quickly, too. It's not just the price that makes them uncommon

Grow your own or make friends with someone that does. I have more than I can give away during peak season

when they're off season, is the flavor still better? no use using something that tastes worse and consoling yourself that it would have been tasty had it been a different month

If you can actually get 'local fresh' tomatoes, yes absolutely, but the rest of the time (the vast majority of the year, for a start) canned are going to beat the socks off them.

(Also there's canned and there's canned.. it's worth paying for unless you just want red broth.)

We have access to some of the best tomatoes in the world, but adhere to the rule of canned tomatoes only for sauce! The acidity is key.

"whole is better than ground" is a general rule in the food industry

canned whole tomatoes > tomato sauce

Here’s a version by the same chef without the paywall: https://lidiasitaly.com/recipes/marinara-sauce-2/

Or as a compromise between time and taste, add crushed/chopped tomatoes to a bottled sauce.

Fresh is always better, even if you don't have acces to San Marazano tomatoes.

This tomato sauce recipe goes out the the poor guys here. I imagine we are the minority here?

1. Tomatoes--any kind. You will buy them initially to use them for sandwiches, and maybe a salad, but will be left over with a bowl of soft tomatoes at tge end of the week. The rest left older will start to rot, so why not make tomato sauce.

2. In any pot, put in 1/4 cup of olive oil.

3. Put in handful of fresh onions in the hot oil. (You can use dehydrated onion. Many commercial kitchens do.)

4. Add a few teaspoons of fresh garlic, or dehydrated garlic.

5. Add couple of teaspoons of salt, and a pinch of honey, or sugar. I used pancake syrup last night because I ran out of anything sweet.

(add a pinch of cayenne pepper, or black, if you like it spicy.)

Using a potato masher smash it all down. Cook 40 minutes on low.

You now have pasta sauce, or pizza sauce, for the week. Add butter when using it on pasta.

You now have sauce for noodles. Add a few pats of butter for pasta. Your guests won't know, but will like your sauce. Belive me restaurants use a lot of butter, and salt. There's a happy medium. A 1/2 tbs of butter will not kill you. The vegan in the group can use vegetarian butter substitute.

You want pizza?

You need dough?

1. luke warm water added to a large bowl. Add the yeast. Amount doesn't matter. A few teaspoons usually.

2. add some sugar, honey, or whatever. Last night I used pancake syrup.

3. Add high gluten flour if you can find it. Add any flour will do if that's all you have.

4. In the bowl mix it like you dislike it. Add more flour if necessary. Add more water if too dry. Just do it.

Pound that dough. After 20-30 minutes it should be the consistency of a male boob. (I have man boobs, and couldn't think of a politically correct example, but we have all all felt a fatty boob. It's just adipose tissue, and skin. Enough of my analogies you will never hear out of any cooks mouth.)

5. Cover that dough with a wet towel, saran wrap, or foil.

Let it rise in a warm kitchen. Since most of us don't have the right kitchen temp, turn on the oven for a a minute, and turn off. You want the temp between 80-120 degrees.

Put a pot holder on the rack and the bowl of dough goes on the rack. The pot holder acts as a gasket between the warm metal grates, and your bowl.

5. Let it rise for an hour. It's now ready to use for pizza dough, or freezing. You could punch it down again, and let it rise, but unless you have all the right quality ingredients, it dosen't matter. (you could add some oil oil to the dough.)

I'm poor, and have been cooking for myself, and my mom for years.

I was trained at Zesto's Cafe in the 80's by a owner who always accused me of stealing. I was unbelievably honest/ernest at the time. I didn't know how the wealthy lie, and cheat, daily.

I guess because I was in high school, with long hair. I did know other employees whom were stealing, but never said anything. I'm no rat. Then, or now.

Trust me tomato sauce, and pizza dough are easy to make.

Making good bread is very, very hard though.

So hard, I have heard French/Italian chefs gave up, and only buy from their baker. Something about the yeast in the air, and the right climate, along with the right stove.

Fresh is always better, even if you don't have acces to San Marazano tomatoes.

Depends very much on where you live. Most tomatoes I can buy make far worse sauce than canned tomatoes unless I am willing to spend a lot of money. And if I'm spending the sort of money I have to spend to get good fresh tomatoes I'm not 'wasting' them in a sauce. Hell even making sauce with the cheapest tomatoes in the store will no doubt cost me at least twice as much as using halfway decent canned tomatoes for a worse result.

A couple comments:

1) I like to add fresh or dried basil to my tomato sauces. I also grow oregano (it's more honest to say that I can't kill it since it spread everywhere!) and will add a little also.

2) Pizza dough does best when made on the "wet" (higher hydration) side. I learned about these: https://www.amazon.com/Winco-APZS-16-Winware-Seamless-Alumin... from a commercial pizza maker and never looked back. Cooks evenly top & bottom in my oven. It's become one of those things I can't believe I ever lived without. Treat them like a cast iron skillet (another good thing to make pizza in) and don't wash them.

Wow, I didn't expect such a great discussion on tomatoes and sauces. I have a few things to check out.

My own tomato story comes from another place in the city where I had a private roofdeck. It was basically full sun all day long. I planted 4 tomato plants, which were amazingly productive, and the tomatoes were so delicious that we ate them with lunch and dinner almost every day. My favorite summer snack became (and still is) a slice of fresh tomato topped with a slice of fresh mozzarella, lightly drizzled with a "green" olive oil, and garnished with fresh basil.

It's somewhat sad that in the US there is no enforcement (probably entirely deliberately as a protectionary measure) of food marks.

In the EU, "Parmesan" cheese must be legit Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. [1] I'd presume that Grueyere also has the same protections of origin (despite being Swiss and not actually in the EU).

It's the same for a whole plethora of local products [2] and thus consumers know a) what they're actually buying and b) have the confidence that it's a legit product.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-court-says-parmesan-cheese-must-com... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDO_products_by_countr...

European wine producers were able to get the US to enforce this, after a lot of difficulty. It used to be you could buy Californian “champagne”.

> In the EU, "Parmesan" cheese must be legit Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

Yep, but it's also relatively cheap if you live anywhere near italy... In slovenia, you can get it even for 12-15eur/kg in some italian discount stores (think aldi, but italian), eg: http://vsikatalogi.si/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Eurospin_ak... (i know it's from 2016, it's just an example).

Getting stuff that you see in american youtube videos is a bit harder here... even "american cheese" (the artifical processed one) is impossible to find.

Try aging your supermarket-bought cheese (the non-AOP parmesan and gruyere).

You can do so in your kitchen fridge, but stick the cheeses in a small plastic container with a tight-fitting lid because they need high moisture (at least 70% - and that's relative moisture).

Open the box when you see condensation forming on its walls and wipe it down with a paper towel. Then close it again. That's about all the work you need to do.

Parmesan should improve markedly in about a year. Gruyere in three to six months.

Oh- unwrap them first from any vacuum bags they happen to be in. Cheese doesn't age in a vacuum.

It's fine if they're already sliced. Would be hard to fit in the fridge otherwise anyway. Depending on your fridge.

Is there a faster way to age parmesan?

That is the fast way. Normally it should be aged when it's still a head of cheese and not a slice in someone's fridge. Far as I can tell that takes more than a year, just because it's such a big head of cheese. The advantage of aging a mere slice is that it ages many times faster.

Thank you cheese_goddess :prayer_emoji:

You also need a :cheese_emoji: to please the cheese_goddess :P

The weird thing is, I don't see that much of a price difference between high-end "domestic" parmesan cheeses and the proper Parmigiano-Reggiano. The Saravecchio Parmesan (that's the Wisconsin domestic you're referring to, I assume) is about $17.99/lb, and the real, imported stuff is about $20/lb--even cheaper at places like Costco. So why not just get the real thing?

Where are you buying your Wisconsin cheese for that much? I’m in the southeast and at Publix I can buy a wedge of Wisconsin Parmesan for half the price of the Italian Parmesan.

Just using the brand in question:

https://www.target.com/p/sartori-sarvecchio-parmesan-cheese-...

https://www.wisconsincheesemart.com/products/parmesan-sarvec...

The price is about $7, but you'll notice it's only about 1/3 of a pound, so the per-pound price is $20-21. Which, again, tracks with what I've been saying. The only difference is you might be forced to buy a pound of the real stuff when you get a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, so there's a bigger upfront cost, but you'll definitely go through the stuff. It's delicious grated, it's delicious on its own, and it freezes well.

I just checked. The real stuff from my local Costco cost me $13.99/lb. At that price, there's no good reason for me to buy anything else.

I swear the buyers at Costco must be living their best life.

Indeed. I've learned about the fake Gruyère from this thread. Why bother when the real thing is not that expensive?

It's not clear they're referring to Sarvecchio. Some people think Sarvecchio is as good as real Parmigiano.

The big difference in cost is in the number of months of aging. Cheap Parmigiano-Reggiano might be 20-24 months old. It gets much better tasting, and more expensive, at 36 months, and better still (and more costly) at 40 months. We'd buy Parmigiano-Reggiano at Iper La Grande, a massive grocery store (imagine if a Wegmans and a Target merged) in northern Italy; there 40 month old would be about twice the price as 24 month old.

That some really odd pricing, there's no investment out there where you could purchase for x, let it sit for 16 months, and then sell for 2x. You'd think the manufacturers or some other entity would just be buying all the 24month to age another 16 months to double their money (less some warehouse / transport overhead).

This isn't just stacking palettes of crackers. Parmesan requires climate-controlled warehouses, and must be often tested, repositioned, and (yes) guarded. It's also a more risky investment.

Side note, but Costco sells a full wheel of real-deal Parmigiano-Reggiano for what comes out to a little more than $13/lb. If you have friends or family who like cheese, splitting one up makes for a fun afternoon, and the hunks you get will last for a good long while in the fridge.

One lucky thing about living in Melbourne, Australia is the large Italian migrant community here (the largest number of Italian's living outside of Italy, live here).

Meaning that we have few dedicated markets here that import goods from Italy, including legitimate Parmigiano Reggiano (and Pecorino Romano which is worth trying). The real stuff has these wonderful salt crystals in it that crunch as you eat it.

Nothing beats Cacio E Pepe made with the real deal Pecorino. So simple and deceptively difficult to master but the payoff is divine.

> a wholly unique cheese

Not unique - there's a cheese-shop up the road that sells a mature Gruyère that is quite different from their standard-price Gruyère, which in turn is quite unlike supermarket Gruyère. And that's all on the Swiss side of the border - Comté is the same stuff, but made 100 metres away.

Comté tastes similar, but it's still different than Gruyère IMHO.

Until 1976, I had never heard of Comté; they sold that cheese as Gruyére, even though it was made in France. In that year, the AOC regulations came fully into force, and it became illegal to sell cheese made in France as Gruyére.

There are many regional variations and qualities of Comté, too.

When De Gaulle asked "How can you govern a country with 200 different cheeses", he was underestimating badly.

Until 1976, are you sure? This docu shows "Le Fromage de Comté" and it's dated 1927:

https://youtu.be/icu-oMerROI

One of the legends points out the similarity with Gruyére, but it still calls the French cheese Comté:

"Le fromage de Comté, analogue du Gruyére suisse, se differencie de l' Emmental..."

Well, I could be wrong. The AOC rules certainly came fully into force then. And as a kid in France <= 15, I'd buy Gruyére in the grocers, and it wouldn't have the snazzy Swiss cross printed on the rind. Perhaps until then, "Gruyére" was a generic term, and they'd sell you Gruyére or Comté, whichever they had.

It was used as a generic term. Even now, people commonly say “gruyère” when they mean “emmental”.

Right, so I guess the video is evidence that the producers of Comté were trying to establish an identity for their product, separate from Gruyère, but consumers, as usual, used brand names as product category names.

That's very common. In Greece for instance there's a PDO cheese called "kasseri" but all of northern Greece calls all hard or yellow cheeses "kasseri". Conversely, they call all white cheeses "tyri" ("cheese"), which usually (but not always) means feta, which is in turn a PDO name for a specific kind of white cheese made in certain areas of Greece only.

I guess it's the same thing with French cheeses and Italian cheeses, and every other place's cheeses. Heh.

There's been a couple of comments suggesting that emmental and gruyère are easily confused. I don't find that, with one exception.

With the help of my local cheese shop (mentioned upthread) I came across what they call "proper" emmental, which is a very mature emmental, a bit like a mature gouda. Only a bit rubbery. And silly expensive, but very nice.

French Gruyère now has AOC status as well, but it must have holes to distinguish it from the Swiss one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruy%C3%A8re_fran%C3%A7ais

I'm surprised that cheese imported from America is cheaper than Italian cheese. (I'm presuming you're in the EU, based on your Aldi comment.)

Aldi does have a significant US presence https://www.aldi.us/stores/

They can't be in the EU, as "Parmesan" is a PDO name and cheese with the name must come from the region of Italy.

I thought "parmigiano" is the DOP name and "parmesan" is a free for all. Apparently, I'd misunderstood:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmesan

And American Cheddar and British Cheddar.

There's plenty of great American cheddars that are as good as anything I've had from the UK.

I don't believe it's not doable, but all I've seen of North American supermarkets is 'cheddar-style' processed cheese and similar abominations; is food-buying just different, does anyone wanting half-decent cheese go to a cheesemonger or farmers' market or something?

You haven’t seen most North American supermarkets, then. Many, many supermarkets except the cheapest of the cheap carry real domestic and imported cheddar for at least 10-15 years.

No, I haven't! It just stood out in the ones I did.

(I didn't mean the first part as a claim to expertise; the second was a genuine question.)

Sorry that I was a bit aggressive. Cheese is a Very Important Matter. :)

I noticed "Fancy cheese" (not velveeta) showing up regularly in the 2000s, when I was starting to shop for myself, and as my cheesy experience grew, "good cheese" like the better stinky ones were more available probably 4-5 years later. Now, even in my local supermarket which is considered the "worst" of all the grocery stores in the area, I can get authentic cheeses from a variety of places.

I don't think people's tastes evolved as much as the supply chain for getting these cheeses around has improved much in recent years, making tasty cheese super affordable.

Every American supermarket sells blocks of perfectly good, normal cheese. You can get Vermont cheddar all over the northeast, at the very least.

Where you might be disappointed is if you like "extra mature" British cheddar, which is not really equivalent to "extra sharp" American cheddar. Personally I find both unappealing.

> Where you might be disappointed is if you like "extra mature" British cheddar,

For cheddar specifically, yes, I'd hesitate to buy anything younger, and if I had to I'd only use it in cooking.

Maybe that partly explains my experience/surprise, but a sibling comment shows photos which though not close-up seem much more like what I 'expected', or rather was surprised to notice an apparent lack of.

http://www.ourdailycheese.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/img...

https://i.imgur.com/WWOuGGW.jpg

https://www.theneighborhoodmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/spoonuniversi-wpengine/spoonunivers...

https://www.mcall.com/resizer/TMbbZ3l7Ik9C7bvyY7rc6Kce43c=/1...

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-RZ602_NYCHEE_P_...

That's more like it! Just wasn't my (very limited) experience. Thanks.

That's not the same, Cheddar is a process not (just) a place and Cheddar isn't protected as a origin.

Most British Cheddar isn't from Cheddar either.

And there's plenty of really good mature Canadian Cheddar for example.

The process you’re thinking of is cheddaring. Many cheeses are cheddared but aren’t Cheddar.

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