Why Is Parmesan So Expensive?
It's probably your favorite thing to put on your spaghetti or your pizza,
but it's also definitely not what you think it is. Everytime you rip open a
packet of complimentary parmesan cheese to sprinkle it onto a piping how pizza,
you're actually sprinkling it all over with... well, god knows what, but it's definitely not
parmesan cheese. If it were real parmesan cheese, you could probably pay your college
tuition with all the packets of parm that you've collected over years of ordering delivery pizza.
This might come as a shocker to you, but companies have been purposefully mislabeling their products
as real parmesan cheese when what they serve is anything but. We know, a company trying
to get one over on poor, ignorant consumers? What a stretch. What might also not surprise
you is that the US government is actively helping cheese hustlers sell you fake parm.
Real parmesan cheese can run $1,000 a wheel or more, depending on how long it's been aged,
and at that price point you'd probably be counting every single flake of parmesan that you sprinkle
onto your spaghetti. Known as the “king of cheeses”, parmesan is so expensive because
it can only be physically produced in just one small area of the world inside Italy. Here,
the unique bacteria that cows ingest and transfer into their milk grows abundantly,
but has difficulty growing anywhere else. With only a few towns in Italy able to
actually make the stuff, real parmesan cheese- or parmigiano-reggiano, if you want to be completely
insufferable about it- is in quite limited supply. Add to that the fact that it must be aged at least
a year before being sold and you can start to see why the price of real parmesan cheese is so high.
This authentic king of cheeses commands such a high price that the parm industry
spread out across just a few towns in Italy is worth well over $2 billion every year.
So how exactly does one make the king of cheeses? Considering the technique is over 800 years old
and can only be used in one tiny area of the world, it must be a complex, difficult process.
Not really, turns out all you need to make real parmesan cheese is milk, salt, and rennet-
enzymes from the stomach of a cow that help curdle milk. Oh, and time, a lot of time.
First you have your dairy cow graze on specific grass in this region of italy, which teems with
three types of bacteria needed for parmesan's distinct flavors. Next, you milk that cow- well,
you're going to need a lot more than one cow because it takes about 131 gallons of milk
to make a single wheel of parmesan cheese. Now that you've got your milk, you stir it
in a giant heated copper bowl, adding your rennet which will help the milk begin to curdle. You must
continue stirring that milk nonstop for hours, or else spoil the batch. As the milk begins to
separate and curdle, what will eventually become your cheese is deposited at the bottom of the pot,
so you then use linen cloth to carefully scoop up all that delicious future-parm.
You don't want runny cheese, so you must carefully dry out the lump of formless cheese
and get rid of as much moisture as possible before finally dumping it into a mold
which will give it its final, round wheel shape. As you wait a full day for the cheese to set,
you regularly switch out your linen cloth so that the cheese won't stick to it.
Four days later you can finally remove your wheel of cheese from its mold,
and give it a bath- for 19 days in a very salty brine. The salty brine will help give the cheese
flavor and fuel the chemical processes inside that will result in a delicious cheese one day.
After its three week brine bath, it's time to... well, give it even more time. Your wheel of cheese
goes on a shelf in a carefully climate controlled warehouse where it will sit for at least a year.
If you're patient enough, you can mature your cheese even longer, and the more you
wait the more you can expect your cheese to sell for. Cheese that's been aged for three
years can sell for about $15 a pound if you live in Europe. If not, you can buy it on amazon for
a whopping $30 a pound, but hey, free shipping. Real parmesan cheese is pretty serious business
for italy, so serious in fact that the process to create it is protected by law.
Real parmesan cheese cannot legally contain more than three ingredients: salt, milk, and rennet.
We're pretty sure here in America it's actually illegal for food to only contain three ingredients
and no chemical additives. Parmigiano-reggiano also cannot legally be sold unless it has been
aged at least one year. The cheese is such a commodity in Italy that some banks even
use it as collateral- and that's not a hilarious joke about Italian stereotypes, it's the truth.
For years food fakers had been selling fake parmesan as the real deal, until Italy finally
convinced the European Union to crack down and make it illegal for anyone to label their cheese
as parmesan unless it was, you know, Parmesan. Here in the US though, food integrity would get
in the way of unchecked capitalism, so our government pretty much ignored calls from
Europe to enforce similar laws. After all, food safety and food integrity is for socialists,
now please pass more of that powdered milk-soy chemical mystery cheese powder.
But what are you eating if this entire time you haven't been eating communist parmesan cheese?
Well, there's literally no telling, because cheese manufacturers are allowed to basically
get away with murder and oversight is rare if not non-existent. One of the few times the FDA
actually looked into the matter though was in 2012, when it raided a Castle Cheese Inc.
factory that made “100 percent real parmesan”. What the inspectors found was that the factory
was substituting most of the cheese for cellulose made out of wood pulp. Don't feel bad though,
because if you buy grated cheese, you're buying less than 40% other cheese. What's the rest of the
ingredients? Well, again, wood pulp cellulose, as well as various chemical preservatives and
flavor enhancers, cow hoof shavings and... honestly, who knows? No one's checking.
There's literally no oversight, but one dead giveaway next time you're at the grocery
store that you're not getting real cheese is that you'll find the word cheese isn't printed anywhere
on the package. Kraft, probably one of the worst offenders, can't even label its products as cheese
anymore, which is why that stuff you put on your burgers and sandwiches is just called “Kraft
Singles”. If you look closely on the labels to Kraft and other cheese producer's products
you'll see the words “processed cheese”, “prepared cheese”, or “cheese food/product”. If you do see
these words, drop that packet and run, because it's not real cheese but rather made from cheese.
What that means we don't know and we don't want to know because the implications are terrifying.
Now go find out what happens when you eat an all-American diet with I only ate fast food
for 30 days and this is what happened! Or check out this other video instead!
