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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

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zahlman

> what ghastly pizza establishment serves fake cheese

Most of them, I imagine, in order to accommodate vegan customers. Some advertise it louder than others.

> what are mystery veggies?

There's quite a variety out there. I've seen broccoli, sundried tomato, artichoke, spinach....

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Vegan cheese is an abomination. Even if one is vegan they shouldn't eat that crap, just eat something else instead. You can make much better vegan food if you focus on trying to make vegetables good versus torturing them into a facsimile of animal products.

Eh, there’s some that are perfectly meh and are useful for texture reasons. I don’t really bother with them, but “abomination” is quite amusing me.

US cheese-in-tube is an abomination (I’m French ;-) ) and my Italian neighbor thinks the same about pinanle-fat-dough pizzas.

As for every product type there’s good and bad. I love this one[0], it’s made by a bunch of artisan chiefs near my city. Ingredients: soy, cajun nuts, ferments. Probable process: cook, smash, add ferment, wait.

Beside tradition offense there’s no reasons to restrain ourselves torturing-with-ferments lipid products that didn’t came out from udders. Fermented products are delicious and cooking has always co-evolved with technology, product availability and customs, why should someone restrain from experimenting?

I share the ultra processed disdain but to be honest there’s as much UPF in "fascimile" that some of their counterpart. That non-vegan-milk cheese has 16 ingredients in it[1].

0 https://www.vegetalfood.fr/affines/3868-albert-bio-100-gr-ja...

1 https://www.amazon.fr/cfuda-Easy-Cheese-American/dp/B000S5PH...

The huge majority of cheese consumed in the US isn't any better than vegan cheese. And yes, the US does have good cheese! It's just a tiny sliver of all cheese consumed.

I don't see how any of these could be considered "mystery" veggies in most contexts, let alone on pizza.

I'm pretty sure they weren't unrecognizable or mystery and it's just being used as a pejorative for food they didn't like

I think the larger reason is that fake cheese is cheaper.

In parts of Europe restaurants are allowed to sell it as cheese. That isn't true for frozen supermarket pizza, where regulations force to either declare it as fake cheese or use real one.

Most restaurants use fake cheese out of price concerns.

Those are very normal weggebobbles for anyone outside the US. Big no-no to vegan cheese though.

Eh, I find vegan cheese very variable. I never seek it out but experience it relatively often. Sometimes it's tasty and chewy. Sometimes it's a bland monstrosity. I don't know why.

Vegan feta has the best success rate for me. Unfortunately, feta has limited applications.

(I'm not vegan but I like to try vegan products anyway.)

If you haven't make shakshuka yet, it's worth a shot. It's one of my favorite places to use lots and lots of feta. It's not normally vegan since it's topped with an egg, but that's easy enough to remove and forget. Eat it with toasted pita.

Come on, it's 2025, no true HN user hasn't tried to make shakshuka by now. :D

I don't even know how to spell shakshuka.

You don't have to! You can just say it's imported from a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, so there's no canonically correct way to spell it.

It's probably a lie but it doesn't sound like one!

Though Arabic has quite a few letters you won't find in the Latin alphabet, all the letters in the word shakshukah map perfectly to Latin letters. But put an H on the end, and quarter-pronounce it.

The spelling still had to be romanized. The Wikipedia page has three different spellings for it, though none match yours.

I stand by my point.

> feta has limited applications.

Politely beg to differ.

It's not particularly sliceable, meltable, or all that edible on its own. That rules out many cheese applications for me.

Then again, I'm French, so our takes on cheese may be very different! :)

Try buying it brined.

Pretty sure I have before but... what'll that change?

Are they not normal inside the US?

They're normal vegetables, but not normal pizza toppings. Just look at the menu offerings of any big US chain pizza place, deviating from that without warning is going to cause disappointment.

I'm from California, can't speak to the rest of the US... To me all except broccoli are perfectly normal pizza toppings. Not toppings I would expect to see on a Dominos pizza, but definitely to be expected on a "veggie" pizza from any independent pizza place.

> any big US chain pizza place

I guess that counts as "normal," but that's fast food, where picky children's tastes rule. Predictability and therefore high-volume turnover of ingredients is paramount.

I thought I liked vegan pizzas, having only tasted the restaurant varieties which either don't have cheese or have some sort of savoury dressing instead. Then I tried a vegan frozen pizza, and I found out what people hate about them. Some gray slimy substance which apparently someone, somewhere, thought was similar to melted cheese.

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