In a world of convenience foods that taste more like their plastic wrappers than ingredients, preshredded mozzarella can't be any good, or can it?
There are seemingly endless mozzarella choices in most supermarkets, typically including whole blocks and pouches of shredded cheeses, any of which can be made from whole or reduced fat milk (these products are called "part skim"). In addition, some supermarkets (and most gourmet shops) sell fresh cheese floating in liquid. Like many of you, we've heard warnings about the pitfalls of using preshredded cheese, but are they valid? We organized a blind tasting of 13 nationally available mozzarellas covering each of the four main variables—part skim, whole milk, preshredded, and block. Then we tasted each one raw and melted on pizza.
A Mozzarella Primer
All mozzarella, be it the supermarket variety or fresh cheese purchased at a specialty shop, falls into a cheese category called pasta filata. This means the cheese is made by stretching (or pulling, spinning, or "stringing") the curds to give the final product a fine, layered effect and elastic texture. This process aligns the proteins into long chains. The result--multiple layers of curd and a stringy texture—resembles a cooked chicken breast when you peel back a layer of the cheese.
The technical designation for fresh mozzarella sold floating in liquid (this liquid is usually water or brine, opaque from whey that leaches out of the cheese) is "high moisture," which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines as having a moisture content of at least 52 percent but not more than 60 percent by weight. Fresh, high-moisture mozzarella is highly perishable, however, and is therefore poorly suited to the long storage times that accompany wide distribution and lengthy supermarket stays.
That brings us to the mozzarella typically found in supermarkets and melted on takeout pizza. Designated "low moisture," with an FDA-mandated moisture content of at least 45 percent but no more than 52 percent, this drier cheese is less perishable than the fresh version and therefore better suited to wide distribution and commercial uses. Many of the experts we contacted referred to low-moisture mozzarella as "pizza cheese," though that is not an official, FDA-recognized designation. They also mentioned that it is a uniquely American product, developed for the burgeoning U.S. pizza industry.
If only the differences in mozzarella ended with moisture content--but they don't. Milk fat content also varies. We limited our tasting to whole milk mozzarella, which has a minimum milk fat content of 45 percent of the weight of the solids, and part-skim mozzarella, with a milk fat content between 30 percent and 45 percent. These terms, too, are defined by the FDA.
We divided our tasting into three parts dedicated to low-moisture mozzarella: first the preshredded cheeses, then the block cheeses, and finally a face-off between the winners in each of these categories. In every case, we tasted the products both raw and melted (on our thin-crust pizza), and we included both part-skim and whole milk cheeses in each stage of the game.
By and large, tasters' impressions confirmed what anyone who has ever eaten a pizza already knows: Mozzarella is pretty bland stuff. All of our samples had almost the same short ingredient list: pasteurized milk (and/or part-skim milk), cheese cultures, salt, and enzymes (as well as vinegar in some cases). As one might expect, we found that so few ingredients do indeed result in a neutral-tasting product. Don't count on finding much complexity or depth of flavor in any mozzarella.
That said, we were shocked to find that the preshredded cheeses scored on par with their counterparts in block form. In our tests, the experts' warnings about the horrors of preshredded cheese turned out to be for naught—as long as you choose the right brand. Tasters found cheeses in both categories—shredded and block—that they liked and disliked.
Tasters' comments indicated that the shredded cheeses reasonably good showing was due more to their texture when melted than to any particularly positive flavor characteristics. All of the shredded cheeses were packed with anticaking agents, usually potato or rice starch and/or powdered cellulose. These starches and cellulose—an indigestible glucose fiber that gives structure to most plant tissues—bind moisture in the cheese, helping to keep the shreds separate in the package. The starches and cellulose lessen the amount of oil that separates from the cheese when it is melted. The anticaking agents were a disadvantage for the shredded cheeses when tasted raw, however, causing tasters to make frequent use of the adjectives "chalky," "powdery," and "dusty." Honestly, though, no one we know would eat preshredded cheese raw, so this factor is negligible.
With one surprising exception, our tasters generally ruled in favor of whole milk cheeses, at least when compared with the part-skim cheese made by the same company. Again, except for our winner in the shredded class, tasters found that the whole milk cheeses were creamier, smoother, and less bland than their part-skim counterparts. Many whole milk mozzarellas contain just an extra 10 calories and 1 gram of fat per serving, so we'll take any flavor advantage we can get, especially if it comes with so few added calories.
See the Results
