51–60 of 166 posts
There are some youtube videos about people making artisanal cheeses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM102CO8JL0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpROVueIcE
Kids! Do this at home!!! I've been making cheese at home for the last year. It is hard - but not as hard as programming and tastes much, much, better.
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta. Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little c…
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own. I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the…
In America eating cheese by itself is usually seen as a very fancy activity.
I can’t think of the last time I had a spread of just cheese in the US, and it was probably a fancy place.
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta. Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little c…
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own. I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the…
There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet Contaminants are a com…
> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.
"Vibe diagnosing"
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta. Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little c…
Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing look to my eye.
What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?
From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did.
The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a better sniff test.
I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…
- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..." Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans are multimodal, machines are not, yet.
The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For now, we have better results with humans!
Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own. I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the…
Why do you think this happens? In America eating cheese by itself is usually seen as a very fancy activity. I can’t think of the last time I had a spread of just cheese in the US, and it was probably a fancy place.
It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly refined thing). It was all delicious though!
It is probably just a joke for show and to fool naive competition.
Behind closed doors, they must do some actual quality tests.
In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta, living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good" to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano piano...".
I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it slowly".
Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me when I was working on the house.