The best cheese for pizza

this video about the best cheese for pizza is sponsored by Squarespace the best way to build and run a website if you don't want to have to do all the hard stuff yourself get 10% off your first site with my link encode in the description let's start with the obvious which is that mozzarella is the best cheese for pizza says science seriously in this 2014 study researchers found that only mozzarella or a cheese blend based on mozzarella will provide the browning and stretching properties that most people expect of pizza but what kind of moths mozzarella comes in some different forms I'm gonna show you experiments with five of them to me there is a clear winner but certainly it depends on your tastes and what style of pizza you're trying to make let's start with mozzarella in its purest form fresh mozzarella what exactly is fresh Matsui in the food science department here at the university of wisconsin-madison yeah it's kind of funny that we're talking to an Irishman living in the American Midwest about an Italian cheese but dr. Lucy knows his stuff and they know from cheese in Wisconsin but yeah he says of course historically mots is from italy in many cases they probably think it was made originally from water buffalo so that mozzarella would look more like the fresh mozzarella that we might use maybe on salads and things but that kind of soft high moisture milky because the water buffalo produces milk that's a lot of fat high-fat product I always think that fresh mots tastes like milk solidified which is to say it's sweet it's fresh it's subtle and most significantly for pizza making it is wet you can see some of the way spilling out of there before I even cut into it and yeah most people usually cut or tear fresh mozzarella then shred it because watch what happens when I shred it it just smoosh --is it's too soft she cannot take the strain Cap'n now I'm gonna put this on a pizza and I'm doing what you could call a New York style pizza which is very wide and very thin and has a solid sheet of cheese across the entire top I will bake it on my preheated pizza steel at 550 Fahrenheit convection that's like 290 C that's about as hot as anyone can get a home oven and that looks pretty nice but when I bite into it that Pizza is wet not moist wet the crust is unappetizing ly soggy there is simply too much water in fresh matzo there are of course other styles of pizza and you can get a really good one right here in beautiful Macon Georgia at just tapped we're a long way from Naples but Korie here is making a damn fine Neapolitan style pizza that sauce is just pureed san marzano tomatoes straight out of the can with a little seasoning in it on goes some fresh basil leaves and here comes the fresh mozzarella he likes to put on big chunks over the basil to protect it but note how he is not covering that pizza with cheese I would say the biggest single difference between Neapolitan style and NewYork style is this Neapolitan style has much less cheese splotches of cheese rather than a sheet of cheese why because Neapolitan style is made with fresh mozzarella pizza without it getting soggy by the way check out these tabletop ovens they've got it just tapped 700 Fahrenheit convection that gets you a product strikingly similar to that from a wood-fired brick oven this innovation is rapidly improving the quality of barroom pizza all over the world and for that I am grateful delicious but say you want to make a different style of pizza you might want to turn to the kind of mozzarella that they developed not in Italy but right here in the United States it was after the Second World War when American soldiers who'd fought their way through Italy brought their new taste for pizza home to big dairy producing regions like Wisconsin where dr. Lucia's in the broader post-war drive toward mass production they found that fresh mots had problems it's just too wet and soft to work with on a commercial scale it's messy and it's not very shelf stable so American cheese makers in the Midwest invented low-moisture part-skim mozzarella often referred to in the cheese industry simply as pizza cheese by removing some of the fat and a lot of the way they got a firmer more stable product that's better for mass production how'd they get the moisture out you standardized the milk to a little bit lower fat content that's the first step the the process then involves adding rennet which is an enzyme that coagulants the milk but it also adds particular bacterial cultures that ferment the lactose is present in the milk and they drop the pH down they then take it and they put it into a cooker stretcher and then they'll warm it up the car temperature is probably around 60 degrees C and they'll heat it up that kind of temperature it's kind of like a heating or a pasteurizing type of step in activates some of the bacteria and enzymes in the product and it helps to extend the shelf life and check out the new york-style pizza I made with it nice browning on the cheese crust is crispy and dry the cheese itself is firmer and almost has a little snap to it when it's cooled down a little bit that snap is why I love lukewarm pizza okay now you might be wondering why not just use fresh mozzarella can do you just slice it up you press on it with some paper towels or something and now that is much drier but let's go back to what dr. Lucy was saying the manufacturers of low moisture mots and do not squeeze the moisture out physically they do it chemically first they do it with the enzyme rennet which is what all cheese starts with and then they squeeze out more moisture with acid and that affects the taste not just the texture with a more traditional low moisture pizza cheese like this one made by grande in Wisconsin there acidifying the cheese with bacterial fermentation Palio another very popular Pizza cheese made in the New York area doesn't with vinegar instead so historically if you think about its roots of some of these cheese's is vinegar or sour wine would have been very common product around to acidify rather than adding some bacteria to do it so it's very common but regardless of how you acidify at low moisture mozzarella has a sharper taste and than the fresh stuff and you cannot replicate that taste by just squeezing the water out of fresh mods and those more acidic qualities are key to New York style pizza which is my main jam another feature of New York style pizza is that it's often made with full fat low moisture mozzarella not part skin if you go to pizza making dot-com a lot of the New York style pizza cooks there refer to it by the initialism WM LM whole milk low moisture relative to the part skin kind this is a much harder product to find in grocery stores and dr. Lucy says there's a reason for that the first being the grease layer that you can get from using a higher fat cheese that might not be what everybody really likes you know in terms of general consumers they might not to be too greasy on the pizza second thing is - is that when you take out the fat the cheese tends to be firmer if you ever bought low-moisture part-skim in a store you'll see it scars firm when it's young and it's easy to cut it's easy to shred so the machine of what we call the machinability factor for large-scale manufacturer or large-scale conversion into shreds is a lot easier all that said I am hardly the only person who prefers the rich flavor that you get from a full fat cheese but where do you get it if it's not in the cheese case at the grocery store they might have it at the deli counter which is where I got this Boar's Head whole milk low-moisture cheese when I bake a pizza with this yeah I get some grease but to me flavor-wise that is absolutely delicious really superior to the parts kimchi's though the Boar's Head brand is not my favorite pizza cheese I can't get my favorite pizza cheese anymore I used to use this full fat low moisture Galvani mots that they sold molded into sticks for string cheese this is an unexpected form in which you might be able to get the product that you're after that was the best cheese for pizza I was ever able to buy at my grocery store here in Macon Georgia but it seems Galvani is only selling the part skin sticks now and when I requested an interview with them about all of this they declined whenever I talked about my struggle to find full fat low moisture mozzarella here in my small southern city I always get people telling me that I should buy this indeed I can buy this here and it is a full fat mots Palio is a very popular brand with New York style pizza joints but this is not poly oz low-moisture cheese this is they only sell it in giant loafs for commercial use so if you're going to get it from a store you're gonna get it at the deli counter that is not this I'm not totally sure what this is but if you put it side by side with a true low-moisture mots you can see how much softer and wetter it is I would call it medium moisture and I don't really like it for pizza it has this weird property where it rises a lot in the oven which tends to make it boil over and that pizza is a little bit wet I'm also not wild about the flavor either I don't know what this cheese is that they sell retail but it is not the same cheese that they sell in big 8 pound loaf stew Pizza Shops if you don't believe me look they don't even have the same nutritional facts listed it's not the same product I have sent many queries about this to both Palio and to its company Kraft Heinz and I have received no response across months if you live in the u.s. there is one place where you almost certainly can find whole milk low-moisture mots and that is Walmart they make this I do not think it's a very good cheese but at least it's the right style assuming that this is the style that you're after which I usually am but if you live in a big city you might have lots of better options certainly you can always fall back on the part skin low moisture moths which you might like better anyway and it's ubiquitous also ubiquitous is the same cheese sold in pre-shredded form which is the last option we shall explore today it's very tempting you just buy a bag open it up and shake it on but there's a problem this bag doesn't just contain cheese it also contains an anti-caking blend in this case corn starch potato starch and calcium sulfate if you didn't add an anti-caking agent whether it's docked or something else to it they you put it in a bag and you know if you pack that bag away in the fridge after a while it just kind of connects to the ball yeah so the anti-caking powder can prevent that from happening but there is a catch it can interfere with the melting and browning of the cheese those materials themselves might not melt at the temperatures that we're doing the pizza baking it and if there's too much on it's almost like you've kind of battered or breaded your shreds that the outside doesn't really melt even if the inside cheese wants to melt at the temperature so that could be one issue this the second issue is they may also soak up moisture that is released from during the the baking process and because they soak up the moisture the moisture the surface becomes too dry and if it becomes too dry then you have more likely to have it like almost like you're toasting it and the latter scenario is clearly what happened to my pie here by the time that pizza was done the pre-shredded cheese was burned this does not mean that you can't make a good pizza with pre-shredded cheese you absolutely can dr. Lucy says this is simply a quality control issue at the factory some producers just put in way too much of that anti-caking mix maybe they don't care that it's gonna mess up your pizza they just care about how their product looks on the Shelf all I can tell you is that if one brand of cheese isn't working for you try another there's lots of options and they're all made in slightly different ways pizza in its purest form is such a simple thing and like all simple things very small differences in ingredient quality can make a really really big difference in the final product and I'd say that a good website is usually a pretty simple thing too especially if you're talking about a simple portfolio website like mine or maybe a website for your podcast or for your restaurant or your band if you're making a simple thing every element of it needs to be right you need a clear and elegant design it needs to look good on mobile or on desktop and Squarespace takes care of all of these things for you all you do is fly your pictures and your words into their templates and like that's it they host the site for you they take care of the domain registration if a custom domain is a thing that you want and if you're gonna sell things or take reservations or something on your site they handle all the backend technicals of that it's a simple elegant solution for an elegant site and you can start building yours for free right now at squarespace.com but when you're ready to pay for a custom domain or to actually publish your site do us both a favor and go to squarespace.com slash Ragusa you'll save 10% thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the video and legit good luck trying to find the right cheese for your pizza and really when you do and you bake your pizza please tag me on it these people do on Instagram it's awesome I love it

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,188,909

Rating: 4.9178734 out of 5

Keywords: how to make pizza, homemade pizza, make pizza, pizza recipe, best pizza, best pizza recipe, mozzarella cheese, pizza cheese recipe, margherita pizza, pizza cheese, how to make pizza at home, cheese pizza, how to make homemade pizza, mozzarella cheese sticks, mozzarella cheese recipe, mozzarella cheese pizza, polly-o cheese, low moisture mozzarella, fresh mozzarella vs low moisture, whole milk low moisture mozzarella, part skim mozzarella, whats the best cheese for pizza

Id: bxlet-gq4Ho

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/aManPerson]

GET/BUY/TRY MUNSTER CHEESE. it is widely available, it's full fat, cheap and has a mild flavor like full fat mozzerella.

[u/Calxb]

Hey I have that cardigan. It's from gap. You have good taste adam!

[u/megdifi]

Interesting fact about Polly O, even with that difference in mind regarding the restaurant version, Kenji Lopez-Alt still considered it the best cheese for Pizza.

Maybe it isn't available where you are but here in NYC we have Galbani Whole Milk Low Moisture in block form, is this different from the string cheese, besides the form factor?

I've used both, Polly O and Galbani, and my family and I have never noticed a difference, but it was never side by side tasting.

[u/rolle1]

I ended up freezing my mozzarella before put it on the pizza, because baking to way to long.