Such a shame: buying grated cheese
Whether you’re eating carbonara, bolognese or putanesca: pasta isn’t complete without enormous amounts of Parmesan cheese. We also have a very strict rule: always use a piece of cheese and grate it yourself. Ready-grated cheese is the source of all evil.
There should be a piece of Parmesan cheese in every fridge as standard. You can keep a piece like that in the fridge for up to two months, so you always have freshly grated cheese at your disposal. Saying that it’s easier is no excuse. The five minutes it takes to grate it more than make up for the quality you get in return. The same applies to young, mature and aged cheese.
Fooled
So just buy your Parmesan cheese in pieces; those packets of grated Parmesan cheese in the supermarket are only trying to fool you. Before you know it, you don’t have Italian cheese at all, but ordinary Dutch Gouda with ‘an Italian character’. And then there’s the powdered variety, which doesn’t do much good for your pasta either. It only dries everything out, and it doesn’t taste like cheese either.
American bags of grated Parmesan cheese even contain wood pulp, according to research by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Bags of cheese are also often full of additives such as anti-caking agents, preservatives or colouring. Yuck.
So much more
A piece of Parmesan can do much more than simply be grated over your pasta, by the way. What else are you going to use a red tub of powder for? With real Parmesan, you can make an Italian cheese board by combining it with, for example, taleggio and gorgonzola. Add a glass of ruby port and enjoy. Or eat it with this red cabbage by Yvette van Boven. You can even use the rind in a soup or sauce. So please never put that strange grated cheese in your shopping basket again.
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