Why I eat old cheese (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Why I eat old cheese (2020)

cheeseprofessor.com

48 pointsarthur2e567 comments

I’ve really enjoyed using sodium citrate lately as an emulsifying agent to make things like queso and Mac’n’cheese. Once you start using it you’ll never want to use velveeta (or its better tasting older sister restaurant variant Land O Lakes melt) again. The other day I was making mac with it and found some funky foot smelling chunks of “queso fresco” (Mexican crumble cheese) in the fridge and decided to include them in my regular cheddar/Gruyère mix. These had just started to take on a little too much extra moisture and had that characteristic “funky but not rotten” smell. My god, that extra funk took the Mac from “really good” to “divine”.

I will second the sodium citrate recommendation. It should be in every kitchen if you make food with cheese that is melted. Cheap, crazy long shelf life, very easy to work with.

Adding a bit of sodium hexametaphosphate is good if you want to make cheese slices or blocks of cheese. Increases the firmness of the final product a bit and slices easier.

(Cheese that's grown mold in the fridge, not cheese that was intentionally aged a lot before sale)

pity, i was expecting an article in defense of delicious aged Parmesan cheese, which, so I heard, is quite good for cardiovascular disease prevention, e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9318947/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1471-0307.1... Well, at least if stays not so popular it may avoid the mass creation of fakes like they do with Manuka honey.

Parmesan cheese already faces issues of a number of fakes cropping up though.

The article doesn't specifically require mold; it only argues that mold is safe if the cheese is hard and salty. It's more about how cheese that's been forgotten in the fridge actually continues to age and develop flavors -- a poor man's cheese-aging cave.

The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.

The author is not wrong, but if the goal is food waste reduction one could start with buying less in the first place.

The author doesn't mainly intend to reduce food waste. He says aged cheese develop flavors that you cannot find in fresh cheese.

While she argues the flavour angle, she also does point out the amount of food waste caused several times.

I am biased from growing up in a place with food shortages: food waste is not a “problem.”

When it comes to food, you want margin for error. You want your home, your store, your agriculture system, etc to have more food than is necessary. Because if something goes wrong, you have a bit of slack before everyone starves.

If your system produces the “perfect” amount of food with no waste, it means the very first crop failure, trucking disruption, etc. puts you into a dire situation.

I’d rather throw out a thing of moldy cheese once in a while.

You don't need to end up with a lot of food waste to have a lot of slack.

We are talking about buying less food or going shopping more often and with recipes in mind and just get those ingredients. The Costco bulk shopping where a sizeable portion becomes out of date and thrown away can be pretty easily prevented with forethought.

That was my idea as well. In my household, we rarely throw away any food. More likely, we run out of food entirely, which necessitates a short trip to nearby Tesco (7 minutes on foot).

I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.

There’s an evolutionary advantage for those whose children don’t starve if the Tesco has a brief supply disruption

Intermediate fasting is healthy, so it is probably the other way round.

So many interesting takes in this hypothetical.

Fatter people have bigger reserves to lean on, but leaner people can hunt the fatties down and, uh, consume their fat in a certain non-consensual way.

The simple answer is that you should keep some “just in case” calories in your pantry, not in fat rolls. Best of both worlds.

If the local Tesco has a disruption, there’s always the Morrison, Asda, or Sainsbury a slightly longer walk or a short drive away. There are many problems in the UK, but there is still food.

You can’t imagine a scenario where your kids go hungry from this type of thinking while your neighbor with a well stock pantry can ride it out?

We had a toilet paper shortage during Covid, you really can’t imagine a food shortage?

Not the OP (though I am the GP), but if you are planning for emergencies, the food that you stock should be non-perishable, or at least long-lasting, and you can always eat the oldest stock and replenish it with newer one.

If the main concern is food waste - as it probably was in the article that we are discussing - disaster planning is not the problem. Impulsive buying of attractive stuff that you cannot finish later is.

> We had a toilet paper shortage during Covid, you really can’t imagine a food shortage?

We had a run on food as well. What happened is that we prioritised food delivery, with in some instances the support of the army IIRC. Something we understandable were not willing to do for toilet paper.

There is a simple reason for that: you cannot have a functioning country if there is a famine and governments will do everything they can to keep a grip on their country.

If it comes to this, having a well stocked pantry becomes the least of your worries as you now have to defend it against your starving neighbours. They won’t be deterred by tough guy smugness.

It’s a good idea to have stocks because it helps mitigating short-term price spikes or unforeseen circumstances such as an accident. Not having stocks won’t cause anyone to starve.

We had in France a shortage of pasta, flour and yeast (for a short time). I think there was a problem with butter at some point (I remember that because I bought margarine and it was uneatable).

At the same time there were plenty of other supplies uninterrupted and au no point was someone alarming about food shortages.

Well, yeah, but the real evolutionary advantage is just to people who have a mountain of children you need a superstore to feed.

Yes I totally agree with that. It’s orthogonal. You should have a lot of kids and have a non-fragile approach feeding whatever kids you have.

Totally. But in the or case, I think most people are voting for quantity over quality, and I'm not seeing a great deal of evidence that it's an insufficient method (so far).

FWIW, kids are great but I have no interest in having any - I'll leave this world to you fine folks to kill each other over.

Mid-term. Long term evolutionary advantage is achieved by not killing the ecosystem that fills the Tesco.

In some parts of DE the supermarkets close at 20:00 and on Sundays. You don't have many choices when to go shopping (assuming that you also go to work).

> I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.

Consider how highly engineered and processed many modern foods are, to maximize their "addictiveness". Assume that the not-so-benevolent geniuses behind that trend have also put some real work into encouraging wasteful over-purchasing of their food products.

This is certainly a possibility.

We waste our time on addictive social networks which are not exactly nourishing. We may be doing the same with our money on highly processed food which does not nourish us well either.

In the past, with less engineered supply chains, people literally kept storage of non perishable food just in case.

Just in case was either war or supply chain issue or crops issue. Just about only people who did not had that could not afford it.

Buying just right amount of food for next two days is modern behavior.

Well...

In the quite-recent past, it was common routine to buy (or harvest) huge (by current well-to-do standards) quantities food "in season", and stockpile it for consumption months later. Historically, cheese exists because it's a way to store the nutritional value of milk - when you don't have access to pasteurization, refrigeration, and modern "steady-ish milk production 365-days-per-year" dairy operations.

And similarly (quite-recent past, before the green revolution and massive farm subsidies), far more of most people's income went toward buying food. So they managed their inventories of stored food pretty carefully - vs. modern "meh, whatever, I'll just buy more" attitudes.

Mormons are still required by their religion to keep a year's supply of non-perishable food.

You can buy a lot of food, and still don't waste it. I buy a lot of food, but waste almost nothing. With three school going kids, our schedule is packed, and having a stocked fridge that lasts Monday to Friday saves time in our daily schedule. I also cook more than we can eat at supper so the kids have leftovers to take to school the next day. Our fridge is often as full as it can get, but everything gets used up. In the rare case where something is wasted, it's because I miscalculated something.

What's the difference between buying cheese now and buying it later if you're going to keep it permanently either way?

My grandfather always used to joke that he would put a block of fresh cheese behind the stove, and by the time he forgot it was there it would be ready.

Behind the stove is a pretty nasty place to keep it though. Have you ever looked behind there? Even moreso if you're renting.. we found all kinds of trash there not just food bits.

My mum briefly worked as kitchen staff for Winston Churchill, and she tells the story that they had to wrap his stilton in a piece of greaseproof paper, hold it up and listen for weevils moving about - for only when it was at that stage would the great man eat it.

Wtf? Your mom worked for Winston Churchill? Incredible. Does she have more stories of that time?

> Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed, diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping.

:-D

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

Gabriel Coulet just started selling a wonderful 24-months Roquefort. It's very soft and creamy, strong but not too pungent, and beige to light brown in colour (it really look like it's spoiled, but it isn't :) ). I'm pretty sure it all started with a forgotten wheel of cheese in the caves that they decided to try out anyway :D

If you have the chance to visit Roquefort (the city) and the cave, you should. That's what the legend tells : a young shepard forgotten his cheese in a cave when he saw a beautiful girl passing by... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roquefort I personally understood the taste of it when I visited the caves there and now I am a huge fan.

What is remarkable with Roquefort is the penicilium roquforti and the fact that it is not that dry. Many dry cheese can be aged and should be to develop their aromas (Comté, parmiggiano...etc).

One more parameter that I find often overlooked is temperature : aromas and texture are much better at room more than fridge temperature. If you can get your cheese out of the fridge 30min-1h before consuming, you will enjoy it much more. Edit: typo

I like to eat cold cheese, somehow having it warm is disgusting to me.

It did not even depend on the cheese, all of them does not taste good to me when warm.

On the cold, industrial side where people just do "close enough", Penicillium roqueforti is also used to make concentrated blue cheese flavor. Food scientists know that blue cheese flavor mainly comes from ketones produced by the mold, which in turn derives from milk fat. So they start with cream, mix the spores in, then aerate and stir to let the mold eat as much fat as possible. 48 hours later, you get what salad dressings use for "Blue cheese" flavor.

Food poisoning is real, Rotten Cheese and Panner could cause severe food poisoning, Until unless you and me are experts in determining whether aged cheese is still edible, a single ER visit due to food poisoning can eat up all money saved in eating aged cheese.

What a divide we have in the world, that nice aged cheese can't come from a grocery store, and you might not eat it anyway in case your hospital bill is too high.

Every time I see such a comment, I'm happy I'm no longer covered under the American health care system.

It isn't like I'm going to start playing Food Poisoning Roulette any time soon. But if I happen upon some bad food, there is a limit to the expenses occurred.

This does not necessarily apply to you, but that system could also encourage making reckless dietary choices with the knowledge others would pay the potential bill.

Except that somehow Americans are not more healthy nor have less of food poisonings. All that price tag achieves that they afraid of a lot of things that are actually safe.

You think people might carelessly choose to eat spoiled food because they won't have to foot the medical bill? Have you ever had food poisoning before?? It's not a pleasant experience....

People tend to perform risk-benefit analyses of their actions, even if unconsciously. They also engage in all sorts of risky behavior.

If they determine the benefit of eating something outweighs the risks, they might do it. Reducing the financial part of the equation reduces potential risk. It’s as simple as that.

I think that's quite a naive and simplistic view of human nature but let's assume it's all true - what's the benefit of food poisoning? Because one either thinks the food is safe to eat or not; why would someone knowingly poison themselves (assuming they expected to survive)? Do you see what I'm saying? Removing the financial risk still leaves the huge health risk - food poisoning can be deadly, and even if not, enormously unpleasant.

I’ve actually had food of questionable provenance myself, including oysters bought from a sketchy street vendor in an Asian country - and I’m not even a particularly risk-taking type.

I accepted some degree of health hazard for a pleasant meal. Let’s say someone managed to convinced me I was also at risk of losing a great deal of money in the process. I might have declined the vendor’s offer then…

OK well that's a fair point; in any case I don't find it a compelling counterargument to socialised healthcare. Having lived in two different countries with such a system, to my knowledge hospitals do not fill up with people recklessly endangering themselves just because they don't have to pay for treatment. Far more common are accidents, and we all have those from time to time - a paid system such as that in the US punishes people for being poor and/or unlucky.

I'm just commenting so I can find this again, as it pithily exemplifies a certain type of argument (prevalent here, but also elsewhere) that is also performed unconsciously: the meaningless application of some kind of principle in favor of actual reality.

There are now more than 8 billion people on this planet. And many (though not as many as you might think) billions before that.

Not a single one of them has ever decided, "Fuck it, this might give me 2 days of violent vomiting and involuntarily shitting liquid, but our HEALTH CARE system will cover so WHOO HOO YOLO BABY!!!"

Which you do with any health care system. Your health care premiums aren't really based off of your health alone, but of everyone that health care company covers - plus the costs of hospitals and so on. Those costs, too, include folks that didn't make the best choices.

And overall, I'm OK with this. I'd rather help folks when they need it even if they didn't make perfect choices than leave folks suffering - and make sure their kids aren't growing up watching their parent physically suffer because the parent messed up when they was younger.

Many places in the world er visits don’t cost anything.

Would have to be some pretty hard core food poisoning to need hospital.

Botulism shouldn't be underestimated however you're more likely to get severe food poisoning from re-heated rice than dodgy cheese.

That said, many cheeses that keep well just end up tasting like amonia if you allow them to ripen too long. As a cat owner, that's just a no-go for me.

Do you have a scientific source for 'get severe food-poisoning from reheated rice'?

This was a meme in the past causing a lot of rice you be disposed of; is that disposal justified?

The concern with rice is the bacteria spores that lives in rice (and pasta) survive the cooking process and multiply rapidly in prepared rice at room temperature. So you just have to store the rice in the refrigerator immediately (which most people do).

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...

Every few years you get a story like "man dies after eating rice stored on the counter for two weeks." But most people aren't doing that. But some people, I guess, don't understand that cooked rice is a food that requires refrigeration.

Thanks for expanding on the issue. Now I need to find out why these spores don't die from being boiled!?

To be clear: not only do they neither die from boiling nor freezing but they also merely "hibernate" in refrigeration. The problem I was referring to is typically associated with Indian takeout in Britain because there is already a lot of time between the rice being cooked (in the restaurant) and eaten (at home), is then often left out for a considerable time before being refrigerated (which simply pauses the process rather than resetting it) and may be mistaken to be safe to leave unrefrigerated because it doesn't get moldy or obviously "go off" before becoming unsafe to eat.

Now imagine someone being particularly sloppy about cleaning up and refrigerating leftovers and reheating the rice multiple times (or at least removing it from the fridge multiple times) over the course of a week. Fatalities are extremely rare but food poisoning doesn't have to be lethal.

My point was just that dodgy cheese is less risky because you have to go out of your way to ignore various signs that would normally flag food as unsafe to eat and the cheese might still be fine whereas cooked rice (and pasta) may not seem particularly unsafe after having been left unrefrigerated long enough to cause health issues.

Basically a lot of people seem to be under the impression that most cooked food is relatively safe to leave unrefrigerated for extended periods of time as long as it doesn't grow mold or start to smell rotten. Usually meat and dairy are the only obvious exceptions but rice and dry pasta are considered "non-perishable" so it's not clear that they're also risky once cooked because they seemingly just go back to drying out. Also there are occasional influencers on social media (often the same kind advocating for quackery like "black salve" - don't google that, it's basically a caustic "skin salve" sold as a cancer cure - and other unsound medical/health advice) telling people not to refrigerate most of their food, often (incorrectly) appealing to history.

Chances are though, that you’re significantly more likely to be poisoned by fresh lettuce than old cheese.

I have eaten quite a lot of things on 5 continents. I got food poisoning from a lot of things as well. Plus common stomach bugs every so often. What I have never seen ever is someone getting food poisoning from a piece of cheese. And some of them are nasty even without considering what they can pick up in a fridge.

Hard cheeses are fine if you just scrap one or two millimetres in the worst cases. Soft cheeses are supposed to have a thriving mould population from the beginning, which prevents a lot of nasty things to develop. The riskiest are cheeses you are supposed to eat very young like cottage cheese. These can be aged with the right culture, but it’s unlikely to happen by chance and they get foul very quickly otherwise.

You should be more upset that a simple ER visit could cost you any money at all, to be honest.

The thing about cottage cheeses and the like is our evolution is REALLY good at detecting when dairy is bad (as also alluded to in the article). So while bad cottage cheese is probably dangerous, your inbuilt system is immediately going to detect it as rancid and be repulsed to eating it.

Yes but what about sour cream?? It’s already sour!

>a single ER visit due to food poisoning can eat up all money saved in eating aged cheese.

I am so glad I don't live in US.

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