Anti-Caking Rule

jackiemeaiii@lemmy.blahaj.zone to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 542 points –

THIS IS AN ANTI-CAKING AGENT HATE ACCOUNT. MY CHEESE WON'T MELT PROPERLY >:{

ERADICATE CELLULOSE AND STARCH IN MY BAGS OF SHREDDED CHEESE RRRAAAHHHHHHHHH

97

Okay that's fine then, you can just buy a block of cheese and grate it yourself. There are these things called cheese gradters which exist for that very purpose.

You can even, get this, use them to slice the cheese thinly using the slicing part of them.

I know wild right.

They're an absolute nightmare to wash, though.

... Are they? I've never had issues cleaning them at all.

It's not as easy as regular dishes, but not that terribly difficult either

I have one of those dish scrubbing brushes with a handle from dollar tree, and it makes cleaning things like this very easy

Definitely worth buying one of those

Just throw it into dishwasher. I won't dull the blades too much

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You just scrub in the opposite direction....

Now some of the other grating faces on some models that stick straight out are more of a challenge.

some of the other grating faces on some models that stick straight out are more of a challenge.

You don't say..

I've never had issues cleaning them. They aren't super easy to clean but I came up with a method that works well for me.

Put it in a pot, add dishsoap, then pour boiling water in it and let it soak for a bit. Seems a bit weird and extreme but it gets majority of the cheese off of it. There's also a technique involving lemon and salt to clean them. Oh and if one has a dishwasher that works very well too, but I know many people don't have them (I practically don't, since the one here doesn't work).

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Wait a second, these are made for grating cheese? And that's their main purpose?

Why, what've you been using them for?

Highly recommend getting a hand grater like the ones they use to shred Parmesan cheese in restaurants. Doesn't work well with soft cheese but it's great for things like old cheddar

I don't like the box graters like this one. OXO and Ikea both make nice ones that fit over a container to catch the grate. The OXO has eaten bits of my fingers, though.

There's a trick to using box graters that most people don't know (I certainly didn't until recently)

  • Lay a towel or some parchment paper in a sheet pan (optional)
  • Lay the grater on the pan
  • With your non dominant hand, hold the handle of the grater and the rim of the sheet pan
  • With your dominant hand, grate, pushing away from you + into the countertop

The mechanics of pushing down/away are much better than holding the thing upright, dangling it over a bowl or whatever. Easy to just push with your palm too (and keep your fingers out of the way).

I just chop the cheese into small bits. One less thing to wash, and pretty much just as fast.

To wash:

1 chopper

VS.

1 grater

🤔

You ever try to hand wash a grater? It's not impossible but I'll take a chopper to wash any day of the week.

I usually chop other stuff as well as the cheese. I started doing this when I didn't have a grater, and discovered it wasn't as slow/awkward as I had assumed. The result isn't the same as grating, but it does the job most of the time.

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Just buy a brick of cheese and shred your own! It’s not that hard and you get more cheese for the same money.

But then you have another dish to wash. I'll just stick to chomping directly on the brick like nature intended.

Or hell, drink it straight from the cow and swish it around like mouthwash until it forms into cheese

I'm no dairy expert, but wouldn't that make butter?

you get more cheese for the same money.

Everyone says this, but everywhere I've gone shredded cheese costs exactly the same per ounce.

Although I prefer bricks since they last longer and I live alone. Shredded cheese goes bad it feels like immediately after you open it.

I, too, hate anti-caking agents in my cheese, also cheese without anti-caking agents, and even cheese with caking agents. I am vegan btw, I don't eat cheese.

Interesting username for a cheese-hater.

Nachos are the chip part

You may be thinking of chips

Your right but in the Northeast "nachos" or sometimes "taco" chips is slang for tortilla chips. I know I hate it too.

Nacho is short for Ignatio, the first name of the man who developed the dish consisting of tortilla chips, cheese, and jalapenos.

More cheese for me then. :3

we can only be friends if you keep eating the exact same amount of cheese or less, I'll not have my stance be nulled by some renegade.

Fair point. I'm not eating more cheese to spite you, I'll just eat any extra unwanted cheese you (being any hypothetical vegans I might eat with) got served that would have to go to the trash otherwise.

But I respect your cause, and while I'm not fully vegan I do try to eat animal products mindfully and reduce my consumption of them.

How do you feel about precision fermentation to make milk products. Presumably this will eventually make cheese we can purchase made entirely without animals. Will you partake in this cheese or just keep the no cheese lifestyle?

I absolutely will. I am actually really interested in a lot of food science stuff and was wondering whether or not you could mimic the sort of processes that create milk and stuff, and lo and behold people be doing it! Pretty neat stuff. Although I still get the feeling you could probably make some decent "cheese" by aging various types of tofus, but I've yet to begin experimenting there. And am also scared of poisoning myself.

What about vio life cheese? That stuff is pretty dang good. Daiya can fuck right off

If you're not getting anti caking agents in shredded cheese, then what do you expect the pre-shredded cheese to do?
Might as well get a block and shred it yourself.

Fancier shredded cheesed use way less, and melt well, it's just the cheap stuff that's bad

If you didn't have the anti-caking agent, the cheese would just cake up into one solid mass, making the whole "pre-shredded" part literally meaningless...

If you want shredded cheese without anti-caking agents, just shred your own - it's cheaper, and only requires a grater and a bit of extra time over pre-shredded.

It literally doesn’t. Like yeah, it sticks together into clumps, but you can easily break them back up into shreds with your hands. Source: I’ve worked a bunch of pizza jobs, both on the high and low end. Guess what, it literally is not cheaper to pay the labour for someone on staff to shred it, at least here in Australia where we pay real bloody wages.

Also, to the OP, “pizza mix” cheese usually is your best bet. They’ll sometimes label it as “meltable mix”.

Ive worked pizza jobs and I can't think of why you WOULDNT slice the cheese in-house, it takes less than five minutes to do!

At least at our place it was the same machine that stirred the dough. Cut a block into 1/8 slices (a 2 min job max) and then feed each chunk into the chute and let gravity do it's thing

Fresh sliced cheese for pizzas in five minutes or less, and it adds like 2 dishes to the pile

To add further to what makes "pizza mix" or "meltable mix" better is that it uses LOW MOISTURE mozzarella cheese. Regular mozz is super wet and doesn't melt the way you expect pizza cheese to

I make my own mix at home using 1/4 lb blocks of low moisture full fat (can get at Walmart shockingly often) and 1/6 lb of a sharp cheddar

Home pizza hobbiest here. I use low-moisture part-skim pre-shredded mozz, but put it on the pie frozen. As long as there's not too much grease from the toppings I rarely get problems with the cheese splitting.

The places I worked had floor mixers, running on 3-phase, that could do 50kg of dough at a time. They have mesh guards that lower into place, without which they won’t run. Because they will pull your entire arm in and break each bone in a dozen places before you can even blink. I have never, ever seen one with an external powered attachment drive like a kitchenaid, or at least never seen it used. A shredder that powerful would almost certainly be illegal under our workplace safety laws (Australia), it would probably rip someone’s face off if their hair got caught.

Besides that, it is still labour cost and time to do. When that person could instead be doing something better. The highest end pizza place I worked at would cook everything in wood-fired ovens. Pre-shred was used on the cheaper pizzas. It was used as a base on pizzas that had things like pulled pork and shredded lamb too. We had real, buffalo mozzarella on some, as well as bocconcini & fresh, local goat’s cheese. We’d also go through 4-5 full hotel pans of it on a Friday and Saturday night. Would make our own pasta in house every day too. There Was Not The Time. Yet it never stopped us packing a 120 top three times over with dozens of orders for takeout per hour every weekend. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, I’ve never seen anything other than low moisture mozzarella sold shredded. Maybe that’s just me.

But almost no one would buy it if it looked all clumped up like that in the package in the store.

I don’t know, I live in Australia, maybe Americans are just that whingey about it? But outside of the cheapest supermarket home brands, most shredded cheese here hasn’t got caking agents. As far as I can tell, people buy it just bloody fine mate. Imagine being this stuck up about shitty, horrible cheese.

Yeah, I'm not defending any cheese choice; everyone can do themselves. I was just remarking that food appearance heavily influences sales, and everyone is susceptible to that bias.

Y'ain't rinsing your cheese?

Not sure if you were joking, but you can actually do that, and it works great for applications like scratch stovetop Mac and cheese when you don't have any block cheese but don't want a grainy sauce. Just add your pre-shredded cheese to a cup with milk and stir periodically until you're ready to use the milk. Pour the milk with dissolved starch into the sauce, and then add the cheese when ready

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

There Is No Ethical Consumption of Cheese Under Capitalism!

We called it wooden cheese in our household, and yes, the alternative is to grate fresh.

But if you're pro-caking, why'd you X it out on the signs bud

Why did I cross out pictures of.. of anti-caking agents?

Sorry, friend. Didn't get that from the pics

It looks like you crossed out pictures of caked cheese

So clumpy. Mmmmmm

that's interesting, I didn't know there was addtl starch in shredded cheese. that might explain why that recipe we tried failed. I suspected that we added too much starch