Quote:
Originally Posted by Renate
To return this to a rant: Why is low moisture, part skim block mozzarella only available in the US?
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Huh? Most local grocery stores have several lower fat pizza mozzarella cheese as blocks. The lowest fat version I've purchased was 17% milk fat and 52% moisture. The low fat pizza mozzarella I use runs about 20% milk fat and 48% moisture. Going by the FDA definitions, either of those would qualify as low moisture (45-52%). Heck, even Costco's mozzarella block is 28% milk fat and 42% moisture which is pretty decent for pizza though the blistering on the 20% is prettier.
As a sidebar, I prefer the way the milk fat is specified in Canada as part of the total weight whereas the USA uses the dry weight. Sadly the packaging only shows the total weight which makes figuring out how much is milk fat is a math problem. Yeah, dry weight is handier for different cheeses since a hard cheese is lower moisture and so has a higher percent of the total weight. OTOH, 100g of mozzarella with 20% milk fat has 20g of milk fat while 100g of medium cheddar cheese with 35% milk fat has 35g of milk fat. Simple, easy. Try the same with the American model where you have to calculate the dry weight of the cheese and then run the calculation.
Probably the best mozzarella I tried for pizza was a Peaks Water Buffalo mozzarella from the Umami Shop but the cost is prohibitive for normal use. OTOH, the blistering was near perfect and it was so stretchy. Fresh pineapple and prosciutto as toppings. Oddly, Hawaiian pizza was a Canadian invention. I sometimes wonder if the Hawaiian was added because of the use of pineapple or if is was used to suggest that it was invented elsewhere. Spam musubi pizza anyone?