I’ve been thinking about this recently since I’ve been making a lot of pasta and I actually prefer the taste of Kraft parmesan cheese on a lot of things over the “real” parmigiano reggiano especially when it’s used as a topping eg. ceasar salad and pasta. I find that parmigiano reggiano has way too strong of a flavor and it clashes too much when eaten with other things.
Never underestimate the power of monosodic glutamate…
I checked the ingredient list just to be sure but it definitely doesn’t list MSG on it. (Also I think it would be very obvious if it contained MSG as the flavor of MSG is not exactly subtle).
Parmesan cheese contains the highest amount of MSG of any natural (i.e. excluding soy sauce, fish sauce, etc.) food. Tomatoes are next, I think.
It’s possible that Kraft has concentrated the natural msg, so it wouldn’t show up in the list of ingredients because it wasn’t added.
I feel like we’re going on a bit of a weird limb if we’re calling cheese a natural food, especially if the yard stick we’re measuring it against is soy and fish sauce
Cheese is, after all, pretty much one of the OG processed foods. Wild cheeses don’t roam the plains to be hunted and slaughtered, it doesn’t grow on cheese trees (treese?) and if your cow is squirting cheese out of its udders, you’ve got a very sick cow. You gotta take a natural product (milk) and go through a whole process to make cheese.
To make cheese like Parmesan, you’re taking milk, inoculating it with bacteria, adding rennet and salt, heating it, separating the curds from the whey, forming it into a shape, and letting it age (I believe in that order, but I’m a foodie, not a cheese maker)
Compared to soy and fish sauce, where at the most basic level the process is basically put soy beans or fish in a container with salt, maybe some water, and let it sit, then strain out the parts that aren’t sauce.
Now of course there’s a lot of different types of cheeses, some have more or less complicated manufacturing processes with different ingredients, and the same goes for soy and fish sauces, there’s a whole lot of grey area where you can argue which ones are more processed or natural than others.
If you were to leave a bucket of milk, and a bucket of fish in some seawater out and forget about them for a few months, you’re probably more likely to have something that resembles fish sauce in the fish bucket than you are to have something resembling parmesan cheese in the milk bucket (though realistically, in either case your probably going to end up with a bucket of smelly sludge and mold in both of them)
And for the record before anyone accuses me of being disingenuous, I’m certain that every bottle of soy or fish sauce you’ve ever seen lists more than 3 ingredients and probably went through at least a few more steps in the manufacturing than I laid out. Fish and soy sauces are more of a broad category, what I described is pretty much the bare minimum you need to do to make something you could reasonably call a fish sauce or a soy sauce. Parmesan cheese is much more specific type of product, if you’re skipping steps or doing things significantly differently, you might be making cheese but you’re not making Parmesan.
It’s kind of weird to think about, but in a certain sense, all three products aren’t actually all that different from each other. You take a base ingredient (milk, beans, or fish) add salt and maybe some other stuff (water, rennet, maybe some other ingredients) and then let bacteria do its thing and wait until it goes so bad it’s good.
Couple recommendations on youtube off the top of my head for anyone curious, I know that Townsends did at least one cheese-making episode, and Tasting History made Garum, which was a type of fish sauce popular in ancient Rome.
And tangentially related, since we mentioned tomatoes, ketchup was basically Europeans’ attempt at making Asian style fish or soy sauces (usually without actually using fish or soy) and it’s only fairly recently that we even settled on tomatoes as being the default ketchup, there were a whole lot of different types of sauces and condiments that used to be called ketchup. Worcestershire sauce, which is actually a fish sauce, is in that same lineage as well. There is a whole lot of weird ketchup history for anyone who really wants to go down that rabbit hole, and I’m pretty sure both of those channels I mentioned have done a couple episodes each that cover at least parts of it.
Someone has to bring that back: I would spend money testing a line of ketchups that aren’t “ketchup”. At this point they’ve lost me as a ketchup customer, and I can’t be the only one, so let’s gentrify, let’s turn it into a thing, let’s look back for all the cool retro-ketchups
Edit: consider the large variety of mustards, hot sauce, barbecue sauce in any grocery: why is there only one type of ketchup?
The only ketchup I bought this year is “curry ketchup” and that is not carried anywhere locally that I’ve found
You can find Geo. Watkins mushroom ketchup online, and if you look around in ethnic food stores you can occasionally find some fruit ketchups, banana ketchup is fairly easy to find, I also once bought a bag (it came in a bag, not a bottle or jar, which is what caught my eye) of “ketchup type sauce” that listed papaya as the first ingredient (it tasted very much like ketchup, I could tell it wasn’t regular Heinz brand ketchup, but if I hadn’t read the packaging it probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it was anything besides tomato ketchup)
At one point ketchup was more of a catch-all term for a lot of different types of sauces and condiments, we’d probably actually have more luck bringing them back if we called thew them things like “fermented mushroom sauce” instead of ketchup, because a lot of them had little to nothing in common with modern ketchup, the Geo Watkins ketchup I mentioned, is closer to Worcestershire sauce than anything we’d usually call ketchup today.
Sometimes MSG it’s writed with alternative names, since in some places it got banned as MSG corps have been avoiding it just writing undercover names.
Still, I’m almost positive it’s not in the Kraft parm. Like I said in the text, I don’t like it because its more flavorful or anything. I like it because it’s bland lmao.
Good point, never tried DOP Parm, but tbh I am not Italian so I am not so much into pastas, anyway Kraft Parm taste good for me too 👍👍.