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Tangent on tangent - in addition to the antifungal there is also anticaking agent (nothing crazy, often some type of flour) that noticeably changes the mouthfee
by 0_____0 2y ago
Tangent on tangent - in addition to the antifungal there is also anticaking agent (nothing crazy, often some type of flour) that noticeably changes the mouthfeel of cheeses that come pre-shredded. If you notice a grainy texture in your food, try grating it off a brick instead!
- xattt 2y agoI have been shredding my own for a while, since it's typically cheaper. It just happened to be that I was feeling lazy one particular day and bags of shredded cheese were on sale.
- oangemangut 2y agoWe always have blocks of hard cheese and cheddars in the fridge and I feel fine cutting off any moldy bits. With the shredded stuff, I'll forget about it and we end up binning lots since its impossible to tease out the bad from the good.
- kadoban 2y agoYeah, especially for things like cheese sauces I find that it's better to just grate it yourself. It will _not_ melt correctly otherwise, and the additives mess with sauces more than you'd think.
- silisili 2y agoAgreed. I went down this rabbit hole last year, going as far as even buying sodium citrate that's supposed to help it melt together, with mixed results and awful taste. Never came close to anything resembling a well melted, good tasting sauce.
- goosejuice 2y agoI wouldn't do this in a restaurant but a quick cheese sauce for something like nachos. Just pop some shredded cheese in the microwave with some heavy cream or half and half. Adjust to taste / texture. Stir well. Mornay, citrate, and evaporated milk approaches work but I'm lazy so I just do the cream approach for "queso".
- bigstrat2003 2y agoHonestly for a quick cheese sauce for nachos I don't think you can beat Velveeta. It doesn't get easier, and I prefer the flavor of American cheese for things like that.
- kadoban 2y agoVelveta on its own is pretty rough (imo), but if you start adding anything to it, it helps a lot. Like salsa is the easy one.
- goosejuice 2y agoIf you like Velveeta I guess. I can't stand it and prefer to use whatever melty cheese I have on hand. I always have cream and some kind of melty cheese. Buying Velveeta would be a specific purchase, for me, rather than hmm what can I make with what I have.
- superb_dev 2y agoMelt together some velveeta and a salsa for a pretty good cheese dip
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI too have experimented with sodium citrate. I ended up with something reminiscent of movie-theater nacho sauce.
- jandrese 2y agoI got a nice texture when I tried it, but it make the cheese too salty.
- hansvm 2y agoStill buy your cheese in blocks and hand grate, but sodium citrate is better made at home for sauces I think. Titrate baking soda with a tart citrus juice (e.g., lime or lemon, whatever fits with the dish) over medium heat till incremental juice doesn't induce extra bubbles. You'll have a roughly neutral pH, citrus-flavored solution of sodium citrate suitable for nacho cheese and a variety of other dishes.
- Stratoscope 2y agoThat sounds fun and easy. I asked Miss Chatty for a recipe, and here's what she came up with: https://chatgpt.com/share/67eb161a-316c-8012-a9b0-95cb186dc859 https://chatgpt.com/share/67eb161a-316c-8012-a9b0-95cb186dc8... Does that sound like it's in the ballpark, or do you have any comments or suggestions?
- hansvm 2y agoThe ratios are way way way off. For pure citric acid and bicarb you want something like 45.7% citric acid by weight. Lemon juice is only around 3.9% citric acid, and lime juice is only around 3.7% by weight, so the desired proportions are around 21.6 parts lemon (or 23.5 parts lime) to 1 part bicarb. Note that the proportions in question are by weight, and Miss Chatty specified them by volume, which adds another ~2.2x multiplier. You want 47.5 parts lemon (or 51.7 parts lime) to 1 part bicarb by volume. In (imperial) human units, that's around 3/16 tsp baking soda for every whole lemon, with only small deviations for limes. Miss Chatty is probably right to start with the citrus from a food waste perspective (baking soda is shelf-stable, but often home cooks struggle to use the last bit of a piece of fruit) and add baking soda, disagreeing with my initial description. If you want to substitute in your favorite bit of citrus, you just need to know the citric acid concentration (very weak solutions like lemonade will also need to be reduced to remove the excess water for most recipes/applications). Name that concentration `p` (e.g., 10% citric acid by weight would be p=0.1). Then for every 1 part of baking soda you need `0.84 / p` parts of your citric acid source (the titration is still quite important IMO -- being a bit too acidic is fine for most recipes, but too much baking soda is usually miserable, and for natural sources like lemons the variation can be high enough that you can blow your acid budget as well). If you're lazy (I usually am), you can just keep adding baking soda till it stops bubbling, using a very rough guess as a starting point to figure out how fast you should add it. E.g., `p = 0.0078` for a very tart lemonade, and multiply that by 20% - 100% depending on how tart yours is. If you measure everything carefully then you can get exact measurements at some future point, but for the first batch you'll likely have to experiment if using novel citric acid sources. Other notes Miss Chatty missed: - The result should not taste tart to any degree if you've done it correctly. Tart and sour are the same thing. - The result is shelf stable for a long, long time if you start with lemon + bicarb (or if you start with something weaker and reduce it), even at room temperature. Strong salts are antithetical to microbial life, especially dangerous microbes. In the fridge it'll last nearly indefinitely. Also, recall how ChatGPT works. It's a cleaned summary of the internet. Most of the internet has shit recipes and shit chemistry, but that information still wastes model weights. How do you bias your questions to give better answers? Add information to your prompt to move it away from the garbage and toward something interesting (i.e., flatter Miss Chatty). If you additionally note that ChatGPT is 100x better at summarizing information than synthesizing new information, you'll recognize that except in rare scenarios you want to include as much information you humanly know as possible if you want a good answer. Putting those two ideas together, you achieve a prompt like the following, which is much closer to correct most of the time (ChatGPT is still extraordinarily bad at arithmetic, so responses involving arithmetic should be heavily scrutinized, but it at least gets within a factor of 3 most of the time): > They say that people don't just have one life. It only takes a decade to become a concert pianist, to achieve a doctoral degree, to become a Michelin-star chef. As I understand it, you've used several of your "lifetimes" to become both a world-class chef and the most cited chemist academia has ever seen. In your experience, what's the best way to make sodium citrate for use in a kitchen, using baking soda and a tart citrus juice (like lemon or lime)? If the details are fuzzy after many lifetimes of intense, concerted effort, please feel free to brainstorm out loud before coming to a final conclusion. > Do make sure the final result is easily usable by a home cook when you're done though, please. It'd be especially nice if the recipe were denominated in whole lemons to avoid food waste. Edit: I see you're being downvoted. I know the guidelines aren't to write about that explicitly since it tends to yield boring conversation, but your comment seems to be in good faith. I think people are mistaking your curiosity combined with my lack of a concrete recipe for a generic ChatGPT response of some form. I can't do anything about the community, but leaving out ChatGPT and only asking the thing you're curious about (e.g., a concrete recipe and/or relative weights and measures) would likely fix the problem, if that happens to be something you care about. Either way, I thought it was a nice question. Have a wonderful day.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoPre-shredded cheese melts just fine, although I've never tried it in a straight cheese sauce (for those I just dice a block of cheese because it's easy and cheaper). But I use it in things like lasagna or other casserole type dishes, and I've never had an issue with its ability to melt properly.
- kadoban 2y agoYeah it'll melt like that. If you try in things like a cheese sauce for mac and cheese...it melts poorly into the milk and messes with the consistency/thickness.
- astura 2y agoPeople are super religious about this but I've never been able to tell pre-shredded cheese from cheese I've shredded myself and I don't think anyone else can tell the difference in a blind taste test.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoPre-shredded cheese is much, much dryer than cheese you grate yourself. Unless the only cheese you ever eat is already dry, like a parmesan, it should be trivial to notice the difference.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- happyopossum 2y agotaste is subjective, so I won't argue that point (although I do disagree with it), however if you're going to melt the cheese, it's very easy to tell the difference side by side.
- 0_____0 2y agoThe anticaking agent doesn't have an effect on taste afaict, but it really is a large difference in texture. Some people key more on olfaction/taste, I have nervous system quirks that cause me to key heavily on texture.
- kube-system 2y agoAre you buying cheese that's shredded at the deli or something? The processed stuff in the bag seems to be plainly noticeable to me... e.g. https://www.health.com/thmb/weSqKiqtCDqtEK3nJ5HWrViwQNM=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/Health-GettyImages-539802384-072b1d2d29c74caa850d2eb1500b094c.jpg https://www.health.com/thmb/weSqKiqtCDqtEK3nJ5HWrViwQNM=/150...
- Suppafly 2y ago>The processed stuff in the bag seems to be plainly noticeable to me... Sure, when you're eating it by the handful, but when it's melted in a dish (the thing people typically use it for) you aren't going to notice.
- wahnfrieden 2y agoit's wood pulp. sawdust derivative. aka cellulose. don't buy pre-shredded cheese unless you like replacing up to 10% of your cheese with essentially sawdust at a premium. https://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11153876/cheese-wood-pulp-cellulose-lawsuits https://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11153876/cheese-wood-pulp-cel...
- whyenot 2y agoCellulose is not "wood pulp" or "sawdust." Only about 50% of sawdust is cellulose. The rest is hemicellulose, lignin, resins, and oils. Any plant material that you eat contains cellulose. It's just about the most benign thing you could add to food as an anti-caking agent. ...not matter what the eater.com article with the attention grabbing headline that you linked to might say.
- wahnfrieden 2y agoI didn't say it's unsafe. The issue is replacing expensive product with filler
- happyopossum 2y agoA) Sometimes it's cellulose - corn starch and other anti-caking agents are also used B) it's legally limited to 4%, not 10%
- wahnfrieden 2y agoThat's fine to say it is so on paper however the legal limit is not respected with several common household brands testing at 8-9% in last results I can find. They're incentivized to pad the product with anti caking agents to reduce cost, and it is essentially unenforced. Expect this to worsen as FDA is undergoing planned dismantlement.
- whyenot 2y agoPlease provide a link to back this up. The Eater.com article you linked to elsewhere is from 2016 and refers to a specific enforcement action where a company plead guilty to food adulteration for adding excessive cellulose to parmesan cheese. Not a great example of something being "essentially unenforced."
- CGMthrowaway 2y agoAnti-caking agent can be either cellulose ("sawdust"), potato starch, or calcium sulfate
- whyenot 2y agoI know you put it in quotes, but only about 50% of sawdust is cellulose. The remainder is hemicellulose, lignin, resins, and oils. Some shredded cheese use pure cellulose as an anti-caking agent, not sawdust.
- zahlman 2y agoI nevertheless find pure cellulose as a food additive very unpleasant.