Because irrational fears aren't driven by in depth analysis they are driven by fitting in with a theme.
If people play telephone pretty soon the tracking chips instead of being in the rind will be said to be in the cheese and either they will be used to remotely terminate undesirables* or tracked from a satellite.
The past decade of social media has proven that that isn't how the world works in practice. Lies fly all round the world before the truth even gets out of bed.
Lies win, because reality is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Truth is nearly always boring because it's forced to be consistent. Lies have no such limitations.
Truth does have the advantage that it appeals to people who aren't complete dumbfucks. Which is to say, a tiny minority.
The average person is much more susceptible to lies that seem evident than truths that are difficult. By proxy, it seems you're also making a statement on the intelligence of the average individual?
There's nothing wrong with incorporating how someone is likely to use information when determining which information to share with them. I'm no Kantian.
It looks like the patent covers an integrated on-chip solar cell. I wonder if the output is by on-chip LED or radio, and if they keep that a trade secret or if it is covered by patent also.
Yeah I had the same question. I didn’t see any mentions of radio in the patent, but the product description document [0] does say:
——
Is the radio frequency signal from the p-Chip harmful?
A. No. The radio signal transmitted by p-Chips is so faint that approval from the US Federal Communications Commission or similar agencies is not required. Emissions fall well below FCC radiated emission limits defined in CFR 47, 15.209.
——
The illuminating laser wand does have a radio receiver. More info in this related patent [1], especially at page 21.
It is not but it's half a millimeter and inert. I guess that all of us had sand in our mouths and occasionally ingested part of it. Furthermore we shouldn't have that part of the cheese.
So, what percentage of these crack open during processing, and how poisonous are they without the sio2 casing? What about when they hit the sewer processing plant, and are eventually dumped.
Also, what sort of environmental impact does producing them have?
Hopefully they'll be forced to label products that have these things in them. Otherwise, I'll be switching to fake Parmesan.
I'd expect the mass of these metals that can be used in a 0.5mm chip to be negligible. Still, I don't like the idea of a future where these chips are used in many food items.
Rind on some cheeses is the best bit: Gruyere e.g. In fact I'd buy it by the packet as a snack - like pork scratchings. If I knew anything about cheesemaking I'd make this my side gig.
You can copy it, but there ought to be some record of where the cheese is supposed to be. If it was sold to California but found in New York, something fishy going on. But ya, I guess just making it uncopyable would be simpler I suppose.
"The innovation combines food-safe Casein labels with the p-Chip micro transponder — a blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital 'twin' for physical items. This scannable new food tag is smaller than a grain of salt and highly durable, delivering next-generation visibility and traceability."
I, for one, had never heard the term "blockchain crypto-anchor" before.
Chewing it will definitely break any casing on the device, right?
The other thing I'd like to point out is that these can be copied. They aren't like a yubikey which responds to a challenge with an internal asymmetric private key.
I suppose they might be mistaken for fine Parmesan cheese. Otherwise they’ll be fine. Have you not noticed what your dog will happily eat off the ground when you’re out for a walk? Discarded socks, gravel, bits of plastic, cat shit, gum wrappers, literally anything that catches its eye when you’re not paying close attention.
Oh that took me back to wrestling a cigarette butt out of a baby pugs eager little mouth. Honestly if that dog had taken to eating tiny electronics it probably would have been a net improvement.
I’ve a friend with a young dog that she swears has pica. It’s proving nigh impossible to prevent it from hoovering up litter. It puts goats’ reputation to shame.
I was thinking the same thing. I never had great results with this, but it's certainly a traditional thing to throw the rind in water used for rice, etc. as well.
Probably depends on what kind of soup you're throwing it into. But yes, parmesan rinds are great for adding a bit of savory/umami/"funk" into your soups and stews. I keep a bag of them in the freezer and grab a few whenever I'm simmering something savory or meaty. Unused parsley or cilantro stems work well, too, as a soup toss-in.
Not sure if it would work well with rice. I tend to use bay leaves, star anise, or even ginger peels/skins for rice. All of those are more aromatic.
In general, the rind is put into food and removed before eating. Kind of like you are making the liquid into a sort of cheese tea... or the way you would season something with a sprig of rosemary, a cinnamon stick, or other spices that you remove before eating.
> Plop the rinds into your next tomato sauce, ragù, or soup and let it simmer. Remove whatever is left of the rind just before serving.
> Make your risotto even richer with the addition of the rinds! Put the rinds in the risotto after it's halfway done cooking. Let everything simmer as you stir and add more broth. Remove the rinds before serving.
Italian here - that's no excuse for compromising food safety, also from a legal perspective.
I might be wrong, but as rind is part of the cheese itself, you can't just embed random electronics in it (unless you apply it e.g. as an external, removable seal)
Yes, you do. At least, I do, and if you don't I'll be happy to eat yours too. I love Parmigiano. It's not really the reason why I ended up living in Parma, but it's a great coincidence nonetheless.
Possibly, no. It's apparently encased in silicon dioxide, and I imagine that is the reason. If it's small enough, chewing it will be like chewing a grain of sand. You won't break it. You might swallow it, but doing so is harmless. You wouldn't want to breathe it in, though.
It looks like it is in the qrcode sticker (which most people wouldn’t eat) - shown in the photo in the article. Eating it is no worse than eating a 500 micron grain of sand, except that the chip is safer and more hygienic to eat.
500 microns is pretty big for a food contaminant. It's about 4~5 hair widths, so I reckon your tongue can probably feel it and it might break under your bite.
I would bet it's safe if swallowed whole, but chewing? Not so sure.
> The innovation combines food-safe Casein labels with the p-Chip micro transponder — a blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital 'twin' for physical items.
someone just burped out some buzzwords, didn't they?
Honestly, this is how every unnecessarily techy project is advertised in my area - which happens to be the same as Parmigiano - just because most readers are so little skilled, that they will take whatever contains those as innovative.
In the end, I guess the same happens in other countries, but hearing the cliché "blockchain"+"industry4.0"+"ai" buzzwords is sadly common especially when trying to attract public funding.
If you consume the piece of the rind which has the tracker in it and it gets stuck in some crevice in your bowels how long are you going to be trackable as a piece of Parma cheese?
I'm curious to know which cheesemakers are using these chips. If you look at a wheel of Parmigiano (a whole one), you will see a number stamped on it. That's the cheesemaker's matriculation number in the consortium. There are 313 active ones right now. Some of them are very big (especially the ones in the lowlands) and some of them are very small (mostly the ones up in the hills). The small cheesemakers have trouble selling their current stock, so I doubt that they are putting tracking chips in their wheels. I can see a few big producers that work with the international market adding tracking chips to their wheels, but that's about it.
Another fun fact, most cheesemakers are farmer coops and act as a sort of bank for the farmers. Most of them can borrow against their "share" of the cheese that is aging if they have a big capital expense that it coming up and they can't wait 2-3 years for the cheese to age and sell.
I love the fact about them being coops and having the ability to borrow with their cheese as collateral. It is so old world and so wholesome. I'd like to borrow against my cheese one day.
You can borrow against most assets you own. Margin in your stock account, a mortgage or HELOC, etc. Credit cards are essentially based on your ability to repay much like borrowing against your future cheese revenue.
Modern finance and accounting more-or-less started in Renaissance Italy. Double-entry bookkeeping meant merchants and bankers kept good books. Good books and good accounting made negotiable instruments like bills of exchange (e.g. checks) and letters of credit reliable instruments--at least when drawn on or issued by Italian banks and their partners around the continent--which meant travelers and traders didn't need to carry alot of currency or gold (dangerous), or resort to barter. Negotiable instruments in turn built up foreign exchange markets. Foreign exchange markets grew foreign financing. And on and on.
It describes changes that happened in war, mining, shipping, trade in (mostly western) Europe in the last decades of XV century. The common theme is finance and it includes a chapter on how bank houses became bigger and could secure much bigger loans (which allowed bigger states to wage wars, or rich individuals to bid for top titles ;)).
Welcome to MMXXII. About X centuries ago "we" imported the Hindu-Arabic numerals. I know, Latin numbers carry the myth of being more "safe" but really you should try the arabian numerals. They revolutionized math and eased reading text alongside.
thumbs-up
You can borrow against most assets whose values are easy to assess and are readily resellable, and which will keep that value, yes. What’s significant here is cheese being in that category. It’s still (like a home or publicly traded stock) the extreme exception, not the rule. I certainly can’t borrow against the cheese in my refrigerator (“fridge”), so it’s weird that you’d trivialize the case of co-op cheese as part of a totally normal trend of being able to borrow against anything.
Most of the stuff in my living room, for example, would not be able to secure a loan, except maybe a pawn loan on undesirable terms.
And it’s really weird to look at credit cards as an example of the same thing. “Your ability to earn and repay” is not generally classified as an “asset” except maybe metaphorically — not a financial/accounting sense.
It's common for plant farmers in smaller countries too. I interviewed at a company that wanted to help banks lend to tiny farmers who have to borrow against future harvests to afford fertilizer / seed / equipment maintenance for the season ahead. Since many of these small farmers are geographically and technologically a long way off from where the banks are at, they don't get great rates because the banks (currently) don't have great tools for assessing the risk of any particular family farm.
Hmmm... It's a two party system right? Borrow and lend. Your example is the borrower's half. The lender [supposedly] assumes risk, and presumes the money could be invested in other profitable ventures (opportunity cost), therefore they charge the borrower interest - I think the paradigm goes something like that... Viola double coincidence of needs, deal accepted.
If the farmer has a shit year, the lender has a variety of options for recourse. Including dispossessing the farmer of land. Historically there were other options like selling one's family. You could castrate yourself and hope to God you'll be accepted into court. Debtor's prison I imagine is also a probable consequence. This is doubly offensive when we consider interest, which can often result in multiples of the initial investment, and that many large scale first world lenders have developed world and the IMF backing them basically indicating they're not allowed default.
Hard to say with the information provided, but it seems typical of the trend.
>The small cheesemakers have trouble selling their current stock, so I doubt that they are putting tracking chips in their wheels.
That gives me trucking e-log vibes. The few big players who are already doing "the thing" use their control of the industry to force it on everyone else because it handicaps everyone who is at a scale that's too small for "the thing" to be cost effective.
Embedding these chips is neither difficult nor expensively high-tech, and verification isn't performed by the cheesemaker: why shouldn't small establishments participate in the program?
On an overseas store shelf the alternative is between real Parmigiano-Reggiano (if the experimentation is successful, with a chip) and counterfeit shit, not between different cheesemakers of the consortium (who, if they care, adopt their own trademarks and branding for particularly good cheese at premium prices).
On an overseas store shelf the alternative is between real Parmigiano-Reggiano (if the experimentation is successful, with a chip) and counterfeit shit, not between different cheesemakers of the consortium
On my overseas store shelf I have a choice between 3-5 different brands of real Parmigiano-Reggiano, with the most expensive one being twice the price of the cheapest one, so there is obviously some competition going on. The only other real competitor is Grana Padano, which most people consider a cheaper substitute.
Of course one or more of those brands claiming to be Parmigiano-Reggiano might very well be fake and I'd have no way of knowing.
what i want to know is how can such a small community have so much clout in european politics that they managed to create the “Geographical Indication” so that no one else can create their own parmigiano cheese. do they fear competition that much? does their product really offer nothing extra compared to a parmigiano produced anywhere else?
The different formal varieties of geographical indications and restricted names are commonly adopted for cheese, wine, and many other quality foods. It only takes a critical mass of motivated makers and a reasonable traditional product, not "clout in European politics"; Parmigiano-Reggiano is merely popular, easy to imitate, and therefore in need of protection.
You don't really need political clout directly, though it helps to get politicians in ones country to be invested in the project. Quite often it's politicians that directly start working on this, even.
The "protected designation of origin" is essentially a trademark that helps ensure that if you buy something marked "Parmigiano Reggiano" or "Parmesan", it's going to be cheese done using specific recipe, coming from its traditional, original region. It doesn't stop you from using the same recipe elsewhere, it just means you can't sell it as being the same. PDOs are generally used to protect local traditional products, though politics can get a bit cutthroat about it (I recall some... hot discussions regarding PDO for vodka)
I learned a lot about Parmegiano Reggiano when I was working at Whole Foods. I was told they crack more wheels than any other grocery chain in the world, and that each wheel cost like $1800.00 (well, it did pre-COVID). IIRC, on average, they crack one wheel per store per day.
You can also sign up for classes where you watch them crack a wheel and then do a sample of various cheese flavors.
It is interesting to find out more about the production side of these wheels. Thank you!
I am all for trademarks. But 'only things made here can have this name' is silly protectionism. Adding electronics to 'fix fraud' really is just worsening the original product. If this goes through I would prefer the fraudulent stuff over the real deal.
You are free to buy or produce a hard dry sheep's cheese that isn't made in Emilia-Romagna. The name 'Parmesan' is a portmanteau of parts of the region (Parma, Reggio Emilia). The name is the region so saying 'only thing made here can have *the name of the region*' is absolutely not "silly protectionism".
Exactly. Nuances in the region such as grass and soil can affect the final flavor of the cheese. In the same way, chocolate from Mozambique is very unique, and I expect when a bag of coffee says Ethiopia or Costa Rica on it, it really ought to be from that places. The places grown truly affect the flavor for single-origin products, but it won’t matter so much if you’re consuming cocoa or coffee that’s blandly mixed together from different regions.
The American government has little interest in protecting the word 'Parmesan' itself; firstly because doing so would be inconvenient to American cheesemakers^, and secondly, because Americans don't speak Italian anyway and don't perceive an implication of "From Parma" from the word "Parmesan", even if such an implication is obvious to those who do know Italian.
^ Just as European cheese regulations protect European cheese interests, so do American cheese regulations protect American cheese interests.
> I am all for trademarks. But 'only things made here can have this name' is silly protectionism
Can you explain what you mean? This seems like a contradiction... Is branding not trademark? If you're for trademarks, why would someone else be permitted to use their branding?
(Devil's advocate. I'm not actually all for trademarks.)
I believe trademarks protect customers by allowing a company to build a reputation and giving a customer certainty about who they are buying from.
I do not believe trademarks that protect a region, rather than a company actually have benefit to a customer. Instead it feels to me like these regional trade-marks are ways a government can appease a local community by enshrining in law that they are the 'one true place'. This is benefiting the local community at the cost of anyone else who is capable of delivering the same quality but is now excluded only by virtue of their location.
Or, looking at it more cynically, this is a way for people living on one side of a line to put one over on people living on the other side of the line. They do this by enshrining in law the idea "we are better than the people who do not live here" as if that is a permanent thing. The arrogance, the self-importance, entiteledness and small-mindedness of that really annoy me. Just because your region was the best at a thing at some point in history does not mean that, in perpetuity, other regions will never match your quality.
The region is just a collection of companies... Identical logic applies. It's just as if one company bought up all the little ones, no different...
> This is benefiting the local community at the cost of anyone else who is capable of delivering the same quality but is now excluded only by virtue of their location.
No it's not, people can make better stuff and put their own brand on it... Nobody excluded from making better parmesean, only from lying that it's from that region when it's not...
To get a DPO registration you must show both historical ties to the region and a specific regional method. There is a quality control board. Probably some of it is puffery; some of it is quite precise.
The buyers did not decide to give this regional trade-mark. That was some government somewhere. The buyers tend to follow that. And perhaps the buyers only value the "stringent quality check" of the mark, and do not care for the "region check" but they have no alternatives.
>perhaps the buyers only value the "stringent quality check" of the mark, and do not care for the "region check"
This goes hand in hand since the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium has no interest in verifying quality of cheese from other regions.
The cheese producers located elsewhere are free to found their own consortium for quality checking, build up its reputation and convince customers to value it the same as parmigiano reggiano.
Good luck competing in any economical sense if you're importing cows from Parma to give them uncontaminated feed from Parma then aging the cheese in an artificial climate like Parma's.
Corners are invariably cut. Do they matter? Maybe, maybe not. But why do you need to name your cheese after a region it's not from? Grana padano's done fine for itself, for example.
Well, it's hard to imagine that such a flagship monument to the made in Italy comes to existence thanks to magical powers.
To answer the question, of course there is a very strict quality control board
All producers of Parmesan cheese belong to the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese Consortium), which was founded in 1928. Besides setting and enforcing the standards for the PDO [1], the Consorzio also sponsors marketing activities
Biotechnology, not magic. Different places have their own unique populations of mould, bacteria and mites that get into the cheese, which greatly affects the taste and texture.
Culturally Americans are terrified of finding such things in their food supply, so it's easy to understand why they don't hold these protected designations of origin in high regard, nor are likely to do much to replicate the effects in their domestic versions.
Yes, of course, sorry for not being precise, I apologize!
I simply wanted to show the connection between the name Parmigiano Regiano and the area it comes from.
Modena is my goto place when I am travelling to stop eating and I've lived in Bologna for two years, the whole Emilia Romagna is one of my favorite places in Italy.
Also, my father in law lives in Mantua, so, I can say I am a Parmigiano home boy :D
> Parmigiano-Reggiano is made in Emilia Romagna, in the
Parma-Reggio (Emilia) area.
> That's the only real deal.
I think this distinction is silly. I don't think the region the product came from matters much. More specifically, I believe certain regions claiming "this is only the real deal if it comes from here" are being chauvinistic, or maybe just trying to protect their local economy.
Champagne is equally silly as Parmigiano-Reggiano. And there are many more similar regional trade-marks.
You cannot call your search engine google because of (among other things) trademark law. But this is not a regional trade-mark. Its because you are impersonating a different company.
I actually favor normal trade-marks. They are the most reasonable form of intellectual property.I believe customers need to be protected from products pretending they are from a different company. This allows them to hold the company responsible. It allows them to judge a product by the reputation of the company, and it allows the company to build a reputation.
I do not believe customers need to be protected from products claiming to be from a region that 'makes the product special'.
It seems to me that, regional trade marks are not so much about protecting the customer, but instead about protecting the region economy or prestige.
I don't see the problem, it's a sort of collective regional trademark that the makers of this traditional regional cheese carrying this specific branding (and their customers expecting authentic product) benefit from.
If you don't have a problem with the likes of Apple litigating counterfeit products using their trademarked brand, why would you have a problem with this?
> If you don't have a problem with the likes of Apple litigating counterfeit products using their trademarked brand, why would you have a problem with this?
Put simply, because I care about who manufactured electronics, but I don't care where cheese was made. I do care who made it, but not which village it comes from.
Specifically the idea that one region is so special as to deserve legal protection offends me.
I wouldn’t mind the knock-offs so much if they actually made an effort to replicate the taste and texture.
While you could make rules that the products need to be at least in the same ballpark as what it says on the label, I imagine that would be quite difficult to enforce. It’s much easier to just go by an established local custom and just declare that to be the real deal.
Maybe the blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital 'twin' for physical items would then create that "anchor" (like creating a bitcoin) that can then be linked (traced back) to its source (and intermediate steps like reselling/processing) when the cheese is finally sold in some form?
So your comment + the ones upstream mean that the consortium "Parmigiano Reggiano" could just handle the whole thing with their own "private & classical" database?
If yes then that would mean that anybody that deals with "Parmigiano Reggiano"-based-products would have to request some kind of access (userid&pwd, or some ssl-certificate, etc...) and submit transactions (basically like a mini-bank only for this specific type of cheese)?
If yes then a blockchain-based approach might be in some way better? You would have to emit many-smaller-cheese-coins when you produce your stuff and in order to do that you would have to consume a big-cheese-coin (which you received when you bought the big piece of cheese that you used to manufacture pizzas etc that you produce).
Not sure about what I wrote - I might be overthinking some things and overlooking some other things... :P I did mine a few fractions of BTCs many years ago, but the blockchain is still not easy at all to understand for me.
> If yes then that would mean that anybody that deals with "Parmigiano Reggiano"-based-products would have to request some kind of access (userid&pwd, or some ssl-certificate, etc...) and submit transactions (basically like a mini-bank only for this specific type of cheese)?
They need a fancy scanner and the right software to verify these embedded trackers anyway. Just sell scanners configured to verify the cheese to anybody that cares to verify their cheese.
No, I don't think so. From the article I think there is a trade association that views fraud as a problem and thinks that that a verifiable provenance would help. I don't see an implication that the trade association or its members are particularly concerned about internal diversion or substitution of the product. It seems plausible that they think enabling consumers or merchants to verify cheese authenticity will reduce fraud, and they may see a distributed means of maintaining the records as a good way to achieve that.
But what does distributing it get them? They don't need to resist sibyl attacks, and they explicitly don't want to let just anyone... Mine cheesecoin, so to speak. Just create a central CA, have it sign each authorized cheese maker's certificate, and have customers verify signatures. Or do lookups against a central database.
Distributing it gives freedom of choice. No need to nominate a blessed CA that everyone has to use.
It's fine for anyone to mine cheesecoin. Probably better for this specific trade group in fact, if nonmembers decide to use this same blockchain for their cheese as well! Customers can still check if they are buying DOP specifically vs. 150mi-local worker coop biodynamic or whatever. The more widely used this system is, the more wholesalers, merchants, and consumers will learn of it and use it, and the harder it will be for fraudsters to pass off their goods as the Genuine Article.
Who's going to run the CA? Who's going to pay for it? Can you get all the customers to add the CA's public key to their trusted list? Will all the producers and merchants agree as well? The producers are the easy part, they are the ones coming up with this plan. Everyone else in the cheese economy: that could be harder. It's not just verifying the "this cheese was made by X" claim, also at every step of distribution you have to update the log "this cheese was sold to Y" and get that signed too, so all the distributors and merchants need to get certificates and learn how to apply the secret keys to cheeselogs. Using a blockchain also requires some crypto-effort, but it requires participants to agree on fewer things, gives the participants more freedom of choice. I could imagine someone proposing the centralized version you suggest, but apparently this particular group think it is better to do it in decentralized fashion and I can definitely see some advantages to that.
You can not have trustless consensus when you have the commodity created outside of the block chain. Bitcoin works because mining both verifies transactions and creates new bitcoins. A blockchain that verifies transactions but just blindly stores newly created commodity units has no purpose. It's just an inefficient database.
That's a key criteria for being Web 3.0. Now basically, the only new principal involved is that instead of value being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive-interactance... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
OT, but I just have to say, as someone who buys "Parmesan" cheese that typically hails from Wisconsin, there is just no comparison with legit Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's the same with "Gruyere" and Gruyère -- a wholly unique cheese with a depth of flavor and character that is just inimitable, no matter how good or faithful the imitation may be.
That being said, I'm not ashamed at all to say that the Parmesan I use most is the $4 wedge from Aldi.
One thing I miss about my old place in the city was the ridiculously expensive market on my block that carried all of the "real" cheese. The real stuff was so fantastic and flavorful that I usually used far less of it, which partially offset the cost.
I also got a $20 jar of pasta sauce there once. I was embarrassed at how much I paid and didn't tell my wife. After her first taste, her reaction was "OMG, what is this? It's so good!". I took a taste and was blown away. Literally every taste just amazed me, so we kept getting it. I only recognized it by the label and never learned the brand, much to my chagrin (and my wallet's delight) when I moved away and never found it again.
Canned tomatoes? Yikes. If you’re trying to beat premise sauces at least get some local fresh tomatoes and have a go and making it from scratch. The acidic flavour of canned tomatoes is horrible in my opinion compared to fresh tomatoes.
For the ~1 month I have access to local fresh tomatoes, I'm going to be eating them in fresh preparations like caprese salad, BLTs, etc. rather than using them on sauces. The remaining 11 months of the year, canned tomatoes are just fine.
Fresh tomatoes are Usally pretty bland 11 months of the year. So canned is the way to go because they are ripe when canned and retain most of the flavors
when they're off season, is the flavor still better? no use using something that tastes worse and consoling yourself that it would have been tasty had it been a different month
If you can actually get 'local fresh' tomatoes, yes absolutely, but the rest of the time (the vast majority of the year, for a start) canned are going to beat the socks off them.
(Also there's canned and there's canned.. it's worth paying for unless you just want red broth.)
Fresh is always better, even if you don't have acces to San Marazano tomatoes.
Depends very much on where you live. Most tomatoes I can buy make far worse sauce than canned tomatoes unless I am willing to spend a lot of money. And if I'm spending the sort of money I have to spend to get good fresh tomatoes I'm not 'wasting' them in a sauce. Hell even making sauce with the cheapest tomatoes in the store will no doubt cost me at least twice as much as using halfway decent canned tomatoes for a worse result.
1) I like to add fresh or dried basil to my tomato sauces. I also grow oregano (it's more honest to say that I can't kill it since it spread everywhere!) and will add a little also.
2) Pizza dough does best when made on the "wet" (higher hydration) side. I learned about these: https://www.amazon.com/Winco-APZS-16-Winware-Seamless-Alumin... from a commercial pizza maker and never looked back. Cooks evenly top & bottom in my oven. It's become one of those things I can't believe I ever lived without. Treat them like a cast iron skillet (another good thing to make pizza in) and don't wash them.
Wow, I didn't expect such a great discussion on tomatoes and sauces. I have a few things to check out.
My own tomato story comes from another place in the city where I had a private roofdeck. It was basically full sun all day long. I planted 4 tomato plants, which were amazingly productive, and the tomatoes were so delicious that we ate them with lunch and dinner almost every day. My favorite summer snack became (and still is) a slice of fresh tomato topped with a slice of fresh mozzarella, lightly drizzled with a "green" olive oil, and garnished with fresh basil.
The weird thing is, I don't see that much of a price difference between high-end "domestic" parmesan cheeses and the proper Parmigiano-Reggiano. The Saravecchio Parmesan (that's the Wisconsin domestic you're referring to, I assume) is about $17.99/lb, and the real, imported stuff is about $20/lb--even cheaper at places like Costco. So why not just get the real thing?
Where are you buying your Wisconsin cheese for that much? I’m in the southeast and at Publix I can buy a wedge of Wisconsin Parmesan for half the price of the Italian Parmesan.
The price is about $7, but you'll notice it's only about 1/3 of a pound, so the per-pound price is $20-21. Which, again, tracks with what I've been saying. The only difference is you might be forced to buy a pound of the real stuff when you get a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, so there's a bigger upfront cost, but you'll definitely go through the stuff. It's delicious grated, it's delicious on its own, and it freezes well.
The big difference in cost is in the number of months of aging. Cheap Parmigiano-Reggiano might be 20-24 months old. It gets much better tasting, and more expensive, at 36 months, and better still (and more costly) at 40 months. We'd buy Parmigiano-Reggiano at Iper La Grande, a massive grocery store (think 1.5 the size of a Target) in northern Italy; there 40 month old would be about twice the price as 24 month old.
That some really odd pricing, there's no investment out there where you could purchase for x, let it sit for 16 months, and then sell for 2x. You'd think the manufacturers or some other entity would just be buying all the 24month to age another 16 months to double their money (less some warehouse / transport overhead).
This isn't just stacking palettes of crackers. Parmesan requires climate-controlled warehouses, and must be often tested, repositioned, and (yes) guarded. It's also a more risky investment.
Side note, but Costco sells a full wheel of real-deal Parmigiano-Reggiano for what comes out to a little more than $13/lb. If you have friends or family who like cheese, splitting one up makes for a fun afternoon, and the hunks you get will last for a good long while in the fridge.
My most common consumption method for Parmigiano-Reggiano is standing in front of my fridge at 2am breaking chunks off the wedge, with a squeeze bottle of honey and whatever berries I have on hand. Can recommend.
A lot of cheeses benefit from very thin slicing - it emphasizes the crystallization of Parmigiano Regiano, the creaminess of a Havarti, or the everything of an Applewood smoked cheddar.
Not unique - there's a cheese-shop up the road that sells a mature Gruyère that is quite different from their standard-price Gruyère, which in turn is quite unlike supermarket Gruyère. And that's all on the Swiss side of the border - Comté is the same stuff, but made 100 metres away.
Until 1976, I had never heard of Comté; they sold that cheese as Gruyére, even though it was made in France. In that year, the AOC regulations came fully into force, and it became illegal to sell cheese made in France as Gruyére.
There are many regional variations and qualities of Comté, too.
When De Gaulle asked "How can you govern a country with 200 different cheeses", he was underestimating badly.
Well, I could be wrong. The AOC rules certainly came fully into force then. And as a kid in France <= 15, I'd buy Gruyére in the grocers, and it wouldn't have the snazzy Swiss cross printed on the rind. Perhaps until then, "Gruyére" was a generic term, and they'd sell you Gruyére or Comté, whichever they had.
Right, so I guess the video is evidence that the producers of Comté were trying to establish an identity for their product, separate from Gruyère, but consumers, as usual, used brand names as product category names.
That's very common. In Greece for instance there's a PDO cheese called "kasseri" but all of northern Greece calls all hard or yellow cheeses "kasseri". Conversely, they call all white cheeses "tyri" ("cheese"), which usually (but not always) means feta, which is in turn a PDO name for a specific kind of white cheese made in certain areas of Greece only.
I guess it's the same thing with French cheeses and Italian cheeses, and every other place's cheeses. Heh.
There's been a couple of comments suggesting that emmental and gruyère are easily confused. I don't find that, with one exception.
With the help of my local cheese shop (mentioned upthread) I came across what they call "proper" emmental, which is a very mature emmental, a bit like a mature gouda. Only a bit rubbery. And silly expensive, but very nice.
I don't believe it's not doable, but all I've seen of North American supermarkets is 'cheddar-style' processed cheese and similar abominations; is food-buying just different, does anyone wanting half-decent cheese go to a cheesemonger or farmers' market or something?
You haven’t seen most North American supermarkets, then. Many, many supermarkets except the cheapest of the cheap carry real domestic and imported cheddar for at least 10-15 years.
Sorry that I was a bit aggressive. Cheese is a Very Important Matter. :)
I noticed "Fancy cheese" (not velveeta) showing up regularly in the 2000s, when I was starting to shop for myself, and as my cheesy experience grew, "good cheese" like the better stinky ones were more available probably 4-5 years later. Now, even in my local supermarket which is considered the "worst" of all the grocery stores in the area, I can get authentic cheeses from a variety of places.
I don't think people's tastes evolved as much as the supply chain for getting these cheeses around has improved much in recent years, making tasty cheese super affordable.
Every American supermarket sells blocks of perfectly good, normal cheese. You can get Vermont cheddar all over the northeast, at the very least.
Where you might be disappointed is if you like "extra mature" British cheddar, which is not really equivalent to "extra sharp" American cheddar. Personally I find both unappealing.
> Where you might be disappointed is if you like "extra mature" British cheddar,
For cheddar specifically, yes, I'd hesitate to buy anything younger, and if I had to I'd only use it in cooking.
Maybe that partly explains my experience/surprise, but a sibling comment shows photos which though not close-up seem much more like what I 'expected', or rather was surprised to notice an apparent lack of.
Try aging your supermarket-bought cheese (the non-AOP parmesan and gruyere).
You can do so in your kitchen fridge, but stick the cheeses in a small plastic container with a tight-fitting lid because they need high moisture (at least 70% - and that's relative moisture).
Open the box when you see condensation forming on its walls and wipe it down with a paper towel. Then close it again. That's about all the work you need to do.
Parmesan should improve markedly in about a year. Gruyere in three to six months.
Oh- unwrap them first from any vacuum bags they happen to be in. Cheese doesn't age in a vacuum.
It's fine if they're already sliced. Would be hard to fit in the fridge otherwise anyway. Depending on your fridge.
That is the fast way. Normally it should be aged when it's still a head of cheese and not a slice in someone's fridge. Far as I can tell that takes more than a year, just because it's such a big head of cheese. The advantage of aging a mere slice is that it ages many times faster.
It's somewhat sad that in the US there is no enforcement (probably entirely deliberately as a protectionary measure) of food marks.
In the EU, "Parmesan" cheese must be legit Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. [1]
I'd presume that Grueyere also has the same protections of origin (despite being Swiss and not actually in the EU).
It's the same for a whole plethora of local products [2] and thus consumers know a) what they're actually buying and b) have the confidence that it's a legit product.
> In the EU, "Parmesan" cheese must be legit Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Yep, but it's also relatively cheap if you live anywhere near italy... In slovenia, you can get it even for 12-15eur/kg in some italian discount stores (think aldi, but italian), eg: http://vsikatalogi.si/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Eurospin_ak... (i know it's from 2016, it's just an example).
Getting stuff that you see in american youtube videos is a bit harder here... even "american cheese" (the artifical processed one) is impossible to find.
One lucky thing about living in Melbourne, Australia is the large Italian migrant community here (the largest number of Italian's living outside of Italy, live here).
Meaning that we have few dedicated markets here that import goods from Italy, including legitimate Parmigiano Reggiano (and Pecorino Romano which is worth trying). The real stuff has these wonderful salt crystals in it that crunch as you eat it.
> according to the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium (the official trade group for the cheese) the amount of fraud is almost as big as product sales: Authentic Parmigiano Reggiano sales are around $2.44 billion while fraudulent cheese is a $2.08 billion market.
I wonder what they consider fraud. Is it that anything which says "parmesan cheese" on it without being official Parmigiano Reggiano is considered fraud? That is to say, the Kraft Parmesan they mentioned earlier would count as cheese fraud (I don't think it is, since as they say nobody is confused about what they're getting).
Or, do they literally mean there is as much cheese sold under the false pretense of being Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, with fake stamps and serial numbers, and so on?
> the FDA investigated a cheese factory in Pennsylvania and found that the cheese it was selling as “100% grated parmesan” was actually cut with fillers like wood pulp and contained exactly 0% real Parmesan cheese, using instead cheaper varieties like Swiss and cheddar. That particular producer was busted and heavily fined due to a tip-off from a former employee, but similar practices are still widespread.
> According to Nicola Bertinelli, President of the Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese Consortium, which works to promote authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano and fight counterfeit versions, the estimated turnover of fake parmesan worldwide is over 2 billion dollars annually — more than 15 times the amount of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano exported each year
You won't find much fake Parmigiano here in Italy, which is their largest market (IMO the amount of fake Parmigiano in Italy is so insignificant that we can count it as zero).
There are other varieties, like for example Grana Padano, which are legit alternatives, but don't pretend to be Parmigiano Reggiano.
It would be like trying to sell a fake Ferrari here or a fake Tullamore D.E.W. in Ireland.
That sounds like the former, to be honest. What I meant was, is there a black market of the big wheels of fake parmesan, with forged serial numbers, claiming to be approved by whatever body controls the name Parmigiano Reggiano. A plastic bag of grated cheese that says "100% grated parmesan" feels like it's not trying to claim to be real Parmigiano Reggiano. I can see why a Consortium would want to impose a strict definition in order to protect their product.
The problem is that it's a real black market, the cheese is stolen and sold on the black market without any assurance that it was handled or aged in the correct way, just as you would imagine in a black market.
So even if the source material is legit, the final product being sold is probably not.
And the illegal profits are hard to quantify, because it's a black market after all.
> there is a thriving black market, as an estimated $7 million in Italian Parmesan cheese has been stolen in just the last two years. Parmesan cheese has proven to be an ideal target for culinary criminals. In order to be certified Parmiggiano Reggiano, the cheese must age for at least a year.
Label fraud aside, I really don't understand the vitriol that gets directed against grated cheese being sold with cellulose. It's only there to make the cheese shake out better (which it does well, you can buy grated cheese without cellulose to compare it to) And besides, there's nothing wrong with cellulose in the first place. You eat loads of cellulose every time you eat lettuce. Sure they get it from trees, but so what? I really don't see what the big deal is, assuming the labels are accurate. The fraud is a serious matter, but the "wood pulp" is inoffensive.
It's not that the cellulose is harmful, but that it might be used as filler in quantities far in excess of what is necessary for preventing caking. Calling it "wood pulp" is pointless scaremongering, I agree.
Cellulose on pregrated cheese is also supposed to impair melting, but I've always questioned how strong this effect might be. I've used grated cheese that melts wonderfully and grated cheese that might as well be plastic, and that's generally been correlated with the price of the cheese. Maybe cheaper cheese has more cellulose, but in my experience it's also drier and more rubbery, and melting is influenced by moisture content.
It seems to be fashionable to see a corporate conspiracy in everything.
From there, it's just a few more steps before people think that Bill Gates is using the tracking chips in the Parmesan to track people at all times, cackling in his secret underground lair.
If it’s no big deal why don’t they put “wood pulp” on the packaging? The fact it saves them money is too convenient by half and if they want to sell it they should be forced to disclose how they’re making it shake easier.
When they're following the law, which is most of the time, they put "cellulose" in the ingredients list on the package. This sort of product is usually not mislabeled. In that case it wasn't, and the company was rightly busted for it.
It isn't called "wood pulp" in the ingredient list because it isn't wood pulp, it's cellulose powder derived from wood pulp (or cotton.) Listing cellulose as "wood pulp" would be like listing gelatin as "pig".
In a lot of cases these same industries co-wrote the law so it gets a bit circular to cite the law as justification. But thanks for the longer explanation. I still feel they should be required to put what it’s derived from. Listing gelatin as “gelatin derived from pig” would be more helpful to make informed consumer choices.
If the label says 100% parmesean but the contents is 0% parmesean, I have 0% faith that the included wood pulp is safe for consumption. Lettuce is regulated; sawdust filler in fraudulent product (from the local PT lumber mill, perhaps?) is not.
From my memory of reading Real Food, Fake Food, they don't care about the term "parmesan"--that term has been rendered generic, much like "champagne" in the US. But "Parmigiano Reggiano" is a protected term with a PDO ("protected designation of origin"). That's the one they care about.
Oh no! A secret delight is to cut the leftover rind in reasonably safe pieces and abundantly microwave them. Once cooled down they become deliciously crunchy and puffy.
This transponder is "smaller than a grain of salt", so it probably doesn't matter, but in any case it's embedded in the casein label in the wax. If you're really worried about it and have a rind with part of the label on it, scrape off the wax.
Well I hope there's a way to remove those trackers, I always put the rinds in soups and stuff so it would piss me off a lot to learn there's some non-food related stuff in it.
so my autistic child likes eating the rind if he can get a hold of it. Rinds are edible, so this is another case really of companies also screwing over the consumer - here are recipes you can use with the rind https://www.eataly.com/us_en/magazine/how-to/leftover-parmes... , although I guess not any more?
Question: Why is a tracker necessary? Is there no solution that works with just a qr code that contains some cryptographic signature, similar to train tickets for instance?
Presumably the grocer or end user will end up with a pile of rind containing the embedded tagging chips. Fraudsters could simply gather/buy the waste rind plus trackers to embed them in their own fake products. Unless there is a robust disposal process (sending them back to the cheese producer), the genuine trackers will just end up 'authenticating' fake products.
You might have missed from the article that these are non fungible chips, tied to an ad-hoc blockchain.
What brings you to think that in 2 minutes, just by reading an article (if you’ve actually read it and not just lazily skimmed it) you’ve been able to find the single point of failure of a technology that an entire engineering company has been developing for years?
This reminds me of the whole shebang around "champagne". There are thousands varieties of sparkling wine in the world, most of them are interesting in their own way.
So, what if we stop use term "parmesan" in our recipes and use just "aged hard cheese"?
https://www.isenet.it/product/pharmaseq-products/
It's tiny (500 microns), passive, photocell-powered (you point a laser at it), and encapsulated in an inert SiO2 coating.
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