Why I eat old cheese (2020)

48 points by arthur2e5 1 year ago | 67 comments
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 1 year ago
    I’ve really enjoyed using sodium citrate lately as an emulsifying agent to make things like queso and Mac’n’cheese. Once you start using it you’ll never want to use velveeta (or its better tasting older sister restaurant variant Land O Lakes melt) again. The other day I was making mac with it and found some funky foot smelling chunks of “queso fresco” (Mexican crumble cheese) in the fridge and decided to include them in my regular cheddar/Gruyère mix. These had just started to take on a little too much extra moisture and had that characteristic “funky but not rotten” smell. My god, that extra funk took the Mac from “really good” to “divine”.
    • hellotheretoday 1 year ago
      I will second the sodium citrate recommendation. It should be in every kitchen if you make food with cheese that is melted. Cheap, crazy long shelf life, very easy to work with.

      Adding a bit of sodium hexametaphosphate is good if you want to make cheese slices or blocks of cheese. Increases the firmness of the final product a bit and slices easier.

    • ReactiveJelly 1 year ago
      (Cheese that's grown mold in the fridge, not cheese that was intentionally aged a lot before sale)
      • random_ 1 year ago
        pity, i was expecting an article in defense of delicious aged Parmesan cheese, which, so I heard, is quite good for cardiovascular disease prevention, e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9318947/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1471-0307.1... Well, at least if stays not so popular it may avoid the mass creation of fakes like they do with Manuka honey.
        • fakedang 1 year ago
          Parmesan cheese already faces issues of a number of fakes cropping up though.
        • arthur2e5 1 year ago
          The article doesn't specifically require mold; it only argues that mold is safe if the cheese is hard and salty. It's more about how cheese that's been forgotten in the fridge actually continues to age and develop flavors -- a poor man's cheese-aging cave.

          The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.

        • Propelloni 1 year ago
          The author is not wrong, but if the goal is food waste reduction one could start with buying less in the first place.
          • terminalcommand 1 year ago
            The author doesn't mainly intend to reduce food waste. He says aged cheese develop flavors that you cannot find in fresh cheese.
            • vidarh 1 year ago
              While she argues the flavour angle, she also does point out the amount of food waste caused several times.
              • xyzelement 1 year ago
                I am biased from growing up in a place with food shortages: food waste is not a “problem.”

                When it comes to food, you want margin for error. You want your home, your store, your agriculture system, etc to have more food than is necessary. Because if something goes wrong, you have a bit of slack before everyone starves.

                If your system produces the “perfect” amount of food with no waste, it means the very first crop failure, trucking disruption, etc. puts you into a dire situation.

                I’d rather throw out a thing of moldy cheese once in a while.

            • inglor_cz 1 year ago
              That was my idea as well. In my household, we rarely throw away any food. More likely, we run out of food entirely, which necessitates a short trip to nearby Tesco (7 minutes on foot).

              I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.

              • wkjagt 1 year ago
                You can buy a lot of food, and still don't waste it. I buy a lot of food, but waste almost nothing. With three school going kids, our schedule is packed, and having a stocked fridge that lasts Monday to Friday saves time in our daily schedule. I also cook more than we can eat at supper so the kids have leftovers to take to school the next day. Our fridge is often as full as it can get, but everything gets used up. In the rare case where something is wasted, it's because I miscalculated something.
                • xyzelement 1 year ago
                  There’s an evolutionary advantage for those whose children don’t starve if the Tesco has a brief supply disruption
                  • kergonath 1 year ago
                    If the local Tesco has a disruption, there’s always the Morrison, Asda, or Sainsbury a slightly longer walk or a short drive away. There are many problems in the UK, but there is still food.
                    • holri 1 year ago
                      Intermediate fasting is healthy, so it is probably the other way round.
                      • noduerme 1 year ago
                        Well, yeah, but the real evolutionary advantage is just to people who have a mountain of children you need a superstore to feed.
                        • groestl 1 year ago
                          Mid-term. Long term evolutionary advantage is achieved by not killing the ecosystem that fills the Tesco.
                        • hulitu 1 year ago
                          In some parts of DE the supermarkets close at 20:00 and on Sundays. You don't have many choices when to go shopping (assuming that you also go to work).
                          • bell-cot 1 year ago
                            > I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.

                            Consider how highly engineered and processed many modern foods are, to maximize their "addictiveness". Assume that the not-so-benevolent geniuses behind that trend have also put some real work into encouraging wasteful over-purchasing of their food products.

                            • watwut 1 year ago
                              In the past, with less engineered supply chains, people literally kept storage of non perishable food just in case.

                              Just in case was either war or supply chain issue or crops issue. Just about only people who did not had that could not afford it.

                              Buying just right amount of food for next two days is modern behavior.

                              • inglor_cz 1 year ago
                                This is certainly a possibility.

                                We waste our time on addictive social networks which are not exactly nourishing. We may be doing the same with our money on highly processed food which does not nourish us well either.

                            • noduerme 1 year ago
                              What's the difference between buying cheese now and buying it later if you're going to keep it permanently either way?
                              • aaron695 1 year ago
                                [dead]
                              • zdragnar 1 year ago
                                My grandfather always used to joke that he would put a block of fresh cheese behind the stove, and by the time he forgot it was there it would be ready.
                                • 8n4vidtmkvmk 1 year ago
                                  Behind the stove is a pretty nasty place to keep it though. Have you ever looked behind there? Even moreso if you're renting.. we found all kinds of trash there not just food bits.
                                • tragomaskhalos 1 year ago
                                  My mum briefly worked as kitchen staff for Winston Churchill, and she tells the story that they had to wrap his stilton in a piece of greaseproof paper, hold it up and listen for weevils moving about - for only when it was at that stage would the great man eat it.
                                  • leobg 1 year ago
                                    > Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed, diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping.

                                    :-D

                                    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_martzu

                                    • leobg 1 year ago
                                      Wtf? Your mom worked for Winston Churchill? Incredible. Does she have more stories of that time?
                                    • wazoox 1 year ago
                                      Gabriel Coulet just started selling a wonderful 24-months Roquefort. It's very soft and creamy, strong but not too pungent, and beige to light brown in colour (it really look like it's spoiled, but it isn't :) ). I'm pretty sure it all started with a forgotten wheel of cheese in the caves that they decided to try out anyway :D
                                      • 0wis 1 year ago
                                        If you have the chance to visit Roquefort (the city) and the cave, you should. That's what the legend tells : a young shepard forgotten his cheese in a cave when he saw a beautiful girl passing by... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roquefort I personally understood the taste of it when I visited the caves there and now I am a huge fan.

                                        What is remarkable with Roquefort is the penicilium roquforti and the fact that it is not that dry. Many dry cheese can be aged and should be to develop their aromas (Comté, parmiggiano...etc).

                                        One more parameter that I find often overlooked is temperature : aromas and texture are much better at room more than fridge temperature. If you can get your cheese out of the fridge 30min-1h before consuming, you will enjoy it much more. Edit: typo

                                        • arthur2e5 1 year ago
                                          On the cold, industrial side where people just do "close enough", Penicillium roqueforti is also used to make concentrated blue cheese flavor. Food scientists know that blue cheese flavor mainly comes from ketones produced by the mold, which in turn derives from milk fat. So they start with cream, mix the spores in, then aerate and stir to let the mold eat as much fat as possible. 48 hours later, you get what salad dressings use for "Blue cheese" flavor.
                                          • BrandoElFollito 1 year ago
                                            I like to eat cold cheese, somehow having it warm is disgusting to me.

                                            It did not even depend on the cheese, all of them does not taste good to me when warm.

                                        • acd10j 1 year ago
                                          Food poisoning is real, Rotten Cheese and Panner could cause severe food poisoning, Until unless you and me are experts in determining whether aged cheese is still edible, a single ER visit due to food poisoning can eat up all money saved in eating aged cheese.
                                          • kergonath 1 year ago
                                            I have eaten quite a lot of things on 5 continents. I got food poisoning from a lot of things as well. Plus common stomach bugs every so often. What I have never seen ever is someone getting food poisoning from a piece of cheese. And some of them are nasty even without considering what they can pick up in a fridge.

                                            Hard cheeses are fine if you just scrap one or two millimetres in the worst cases. Soft cheeses are supposed to have a thriving mould population from the beginning, which prevents a lot of nasty things to develop. The riskiest are cheeses you are supposed to eat very young like cottage cheese. These can be aged with the right culture, but it’s unlikely to happen by chance and they get foul very quickly otherwise.

                                            You should be more upset that a simple ER visit could cost you any money at all, to be honest.

                                            • SOLAR_FIELDS 1 year ago
                                              The thing about cottage cheeses and the like is our evolution is REALLY good at detecting when dairy is bad (as also alluded to in the article). So while bad cottage cheese is probably dangerous, your inbuilt system is immediately going to detect it as rancid and be repulsed to eating it.
                                              • matt-attack 1 year ago
                                                Yes but what about sour cream?? It’s already sour!
                                            • Broken_Hippo 1 year ago
                                              Every time I see such a comment, I'm happy I'm no longer covered under the American health care system.

                                              It isn't like I'm going to start playing Food Poisoning Roulette any time soon. But if I happen upon some bad food, there is a limit to the expenses occurred.

                                              • mypastself 1 year ago
                                                This does not necessarily apply to you, but that system could also encourage making reckless dietary choices with the knowledge others would pay the potential bill.
                                                • Broken_Hippo 1 year ago
                                                  Which you do with any health care system. Your health care premiums aren't really based off of your health alone, but of everyone that health care company covers - plus the costs of hospitals and so on. Those costs, too, include folks that didn't make the best choices.

                                                  And overall, I'm OK with this. I'd rather help folks when they need it even if they didn't make perfect choices than leave folks suffering - and make sure their kids aren't growing up watching their parent physically suffer because the parent messed up when they was younger.

                                                  • danparsonson 1 year ago
                                                    You think people might carelessly choose to eat spoiled food because they won't have to foot the medical bill? Have you ever had food poisoning before?? It's not a pleasant experience....
                                                    • watwut 1 year ago
                                                      Except that somehow Americans are not more healthy nor have less of food poisonings. All that price tag achieves that they afraid of a lot of things that are actually safe.
                                                  • OJFord 1 year ago
                                                    What a divide we have in the world, that nice aged cheese can't come from a grocery store, and you might not eat it anyway in case your hospital bill is too high.
                                                    • refactor_master 1 year ago
                                                      Chances are though, that you’re significantly more likely to be poisoned by fresh lettuce than old cheese.
                                                      • katbyte 1 year ago
                                                        Many places in the world er visits don’t cost anything.
                                                        • speedbird 1 year ago
                                                          Would have to be some pretty hard core food poisoning to need hospital.
                                                          • hnbad 1 year ago
                                                            Botulism shouldn't be underestimated however you're more likely to get severe food poisoning from re-heated rice than dodgy cheese.

                                                            That said, many cheeses that keep well just end up tasting like amonia if you allow them to ripen too long. As a cat owner, that's just a no-go for me.

                                                        • sBqQu3U0wH 1 year ago
                                                          >a single ER visit due to food poisoning can eat up all money saved in eating aged cheese.

                                                          I am so glad I don't live in US.