[HN Gopher] Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
___________________________________________________________________
Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
Author : speckx
Score : 133 points
Date : 2025-04-10 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cheeseprofessor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cheeseprofessor.com)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Will an AI be able to do this too? Probably.
|
| Hey! I don't think it's a good idea. But if it's cheap and
| effective, guess how long it will take?
| mano78 wrote:
| Not even an AI, there are simpler ways. But as an italian, I
| will be in the pitchforks-armed horrified mob if this will be
| proposed. Not a chance.
| alwa wrote:
| Technically? Not long. Socially and politically? My money's on
| the _battitore_.
| maxbond wrote:
| It's been possible to automate this job away for decades, with
| no AI necessary. You could image these cheese wheels with
| ultrasound or X-rays and establish thresholds for the size of
| voids which are tolerable. This must be a concern wherever
| parts are cast, so surely there are off the shelf solutions.
| Presumably this isn't news to the relevant parties and they
| value having human battitores over the savings.
| pvg wrote:
| The 'savings' could also take an unreasonably long time to
| realize. The capital outlay is not small (the scanning
| machines, their maintenance, still need humans to categorize
| the cheeses) and artisanal cheese probably isn't all that
| high-volume a business nor is it particularly bound by
| precision and tight tolerances - it can matter a lot that
| some doodad that goes into a machine is defect free, less so
| with a hunk of cheese.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Just like people sometimes question the human element in judging
| sports, I wonder if there are cheesemakers who think these guys
| are simply against them or favorable to their neighbors.
|
| One thing I've also wondered about this process. When I buy
| Parmigiano Reggiano, it's just sold as "Parmigiano Reggiano".
| There's no discernable branding beyond that (compared to the
| Pecorino Romano I buy, which has "Locatelli" plastered all over
| it). Is this true all over? Do any HNers seek out Parmigiano
| Reggiano from their favorite dairy?
| lores wrote:
| From what I understand, all parmigiano is sold through a
| consortium/coop. The only dairy identifying mark is three
| digits stencilled onto the rind.
|
| https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/product-guide-seals-and-m...
| zeitg3ist wrote:
| If you buy it vacuum-sealed from a shop, the packaging usually
| has additional branding from the producer.
|
| Not a "favorite dairy", but if it's convenient to do so, I
| usually look for the "vacche rosse" type, which is more
| expensive but also noticeably different (and better). Of course
| it would be a waste to grate it over pasta; better to eat it on
| its own.
| darkwater wrote:
| Vacche rosse 24 months and a glass of red wine, you just made
| me salivate.
|
| The 36 months is too strong in my opinion, still delicious
| but I like the 24 more.
| SamBam wrote:
| I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect,
| based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it
| will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
|
| It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like
| this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise,
| I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to
| detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or
| lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where
| the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the
| final product, besides the feeling of tradition.
|
| Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this
| is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine,
| replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a
| short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad
| cheese.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The problem is it's actually a super fun thought
| experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do
| this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be
| taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a
| silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly
| blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else)
| a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a
| profession.
|
| It sucks.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just
| change?
|
| I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram
| models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right.
| Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
|
| I wouldn't say the profession got destroyed. I just work with
| different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I'm testing
| different apis or embedding models.
|
| The old job doesn't exist anymore, in many ways I am the
| classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn't say
| it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools
| today to get intelligence from PDFs.
| woah wrote:
| There's no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of
| this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with
| Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning
| through firsthand experience how to assess each form.
|
| "The particularity of this profession to me is that it's
| like it was 2 years ago, and it's a skill that's handed
| down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert,
| most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to
| them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You
| try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you
| begin to do more on your own," explained Stocchi. "It's a
| big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing
| it, you can't damage the forms."
| abirch wrote:
| The world is constantly changing, some professions are
| destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time.
| Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when
| he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and
| destroyed the trade.
|
| some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies
| spawn from unviable professions.
| paulorlando wrote:
| And even with the existence of those tools, the old
| professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in
| niches. For example, even today there are people who are
| paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be
| called "knocker-up."
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by
| the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually
| exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on
| the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people
| are working with streetlights now.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on
| reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person
| undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a
| machine could do it better and more efficiently.
|
| Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's
| problems.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution
| would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for:
| voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..."_
|
| Out of pure curiosity, how _would_ an industrial process
| engineer approach this problem, de novo?
| Sanzig wrote:
| Industrial CT would probably be pretty effective at giving a
| density distribution and identifying voids, but that may be
| overkill - a couple planes of X-ray imaging may be
| sufficient.
|
| Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many
| points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
| leansensei wrote:
| Microphones and spectral analysis. Or the same equipment used
| for flaw detection of welds with ultrasound.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Ultrasound seems to be viable
|
| > A study on structural quality control of Swiss-type cheese
| with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode
| pulse-echo setup using 1-2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to
| detect cheese-eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show
| that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor
| the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary
| results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored
| with ultrasonic velocity measurements.
|
| https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-
| abstract/894/1/1328/953...
| jdietrich wrote:
| Note that this is already industry-standard for non-
| destructive testing of metal, concrete and composites.
| Handheld ultrasonic tomography devices are commercially
| available and could plausibly be used on cheese with only
| minor modification.
|
| https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-
| pulse-e...
| raverbashing wrote:
| Just doing the same thing they do, basically. Have a tiny
| transducer "hit" the cheese and listen for echo back.
|
| Now, I don't think ultrasound would work (it's a harder
| cheese than Swiss cheese), also the mechanical interface
| would be a complication (you can't gel the cheese). CT would
| work but be expensive
|
| But tiny percussions and analysis of echo/transmission delays
| would work in principle
| eecc wrote:
| A sonogram... it doesn't even need to be AI
| maxbond wrote:
| Other commenters have given what's probably the right answer,
| but in the spirit of exploration, I wonder about electrical
| impedance tomography. I'd think a salty cheese would be a
| pretty good medium to pass electricity through, and since the
| wheels are very uniform in shape, you could make a chuck that
| held electrodes in contact with the wheel. We don't really
| need precise information about the shape and location of the
| voids, we're not going to do surgery on the cheese, so the
| coarseness of EIT might not be an issue.
| floatrock wrote:
| (Admittedly without knowing much about it) I'll throw Ground
| Penetrating Radar onto this armchair metaphorical ideas
| whiteboard. The industrial CT scanner idea uses x-rays, while
| GPR is more in the UHF/VHF frequencies which probably means
| cheaper/easier? The tech seems to have some tunability for
| the specific application:
|
| > Thus operating frequency is always a trade-off between
| resolution and penetration. Optimal depth of subsurface
| penetration is achieved in ice where the depth of penetration
| can achieve several thousand metres (to bedrock in Greenland)
| at low GPR frequencies. Dry sandy soils or massive dry
| materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete tend to be
| resistive rather than conductive, and the depth of
| penetration could be up to 15 metres (49 ft). However, in
| moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical
| conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few
| centimetres.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar
| sklivvz1971 wrote:
| It wouldn't. Not for now
|
| It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the
| response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans
| are multimodal, machines are not, yet.
|
| The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we
| can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For
| now, we have better results with humans!
|
| Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual
| processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more
| science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized
| environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
| adrianN wrote:
| Preparing a Michelin star worthy meal is orders of
| magnitude harder than checking a cheese for defects.
| hooverd wrote:
| Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll
| automate art and science and creativity so you have more time
| to do low-value manufacturing".
| hammock wrote:
| >I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect,
| based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it
| will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
|
| It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at
| cracking into the Italian market.
| staplers wrote:
| As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy
| changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of
| bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They
| understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they
| understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had
| there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that
| enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor.
|
| It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in
| a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that
| lasts for an hour.
| colordrops wrote:
| Bitterness seems to be common in Mediterranean cuisine in
| general.
| xandrius wrote:
| Wait until you realise that coffee can also not be toasted
| dark to death. Then you get to explore the other tastes of
| coffee too!
| paulorlando wrote:
| It's on a different level.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What do you do now?
|
| I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby
| roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don't consider myself
| a snob, but I put some effort in.
|
| Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I
| add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so
| they can't really be so perfect.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| lmao, they don't stand a chance. We're talking about a
| country where the police has a special olive oil tasting
| department to test if local producers aren't secretly mixing
| their extra virgin oil with chemically treated oil from last
| year. Nobody food snobs like the Italians (and I love them
| for it).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We're talking about a country where the police has a
| special olive oil tasting department
|
| The US government operates several special tasting
| departments.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Probably not anymore
| faizan-ali wrote:
| In the US, the best example is in California. To get the
| California Olive Oil Council stamp of extra virgin
| quality, you must have your oil tasted by the government
| body. I'm one of such tasters :)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| ok, then I'll link this video again to make sure you
| don't miss it because I bet it's extra entertaining for
| you:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Do the US tasting departments disqualify olive oil for
| daring to be (gasp!) _Spanish_ in origin though?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it
| will continue being done by hand for another hundred years._
|
| I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the
| _battitore_ be written into the standard for the cheese?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a
| short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad
| cheese._
|
| I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next
| step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies
| out of a process becomes more important than the product.
|
| Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an
| art.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > Food is an art.
|
| While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art.
| It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for
| survival.
| nomel wrote:
| > end up with industrially-produced bad cheese.
|
| It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough
| capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than
| cheese.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers.
|
| The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if
| we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but
| rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of
| course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
| david-gpu wrote:
| At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese
| today because it is too expensive for them. Those people
| are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese.
|
| On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as
| much as the want out of it at its current price. Those
| would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section
| if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that
| it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium
| version
|
| Edit: I can point to cases of that happening
|
| Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another
| car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version
| that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
| stouset wrote:
| It's also worth considering that at most you'd be automating 24
| jobs.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| The website makes me think they want lots of money. It's as if
| they are saying leave the cheese to the experts. As a hacker I
| wonder how much of that is true.
| tecleandor wrote:
| If you want to see it in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Zg3nAtyDc
| jtbayly wrote:
| Thanks. I almost missed this because I searched the comment
| page for "video" so I'm mentioning video here so others can
| find it. :)
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| TLDR: The Italian way of doing acoustic, non-destructive testing
| of a material. This is also done in many other things such as
| pipelines, chairlifts, and welded metals or machines that have
| pre-recorded acoustic signatures or sound recordings. Hit it with
| a hammer, listen to the tone. If it sounds very different,
| inspect or reject.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Why not!
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other
| day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but
| dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a
| hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few
| weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it.
|
| Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about
| right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could
| absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously.
|
| The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was
| fully automated with no human involvement at all!
| alnwlsn wrote:
| This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years
| ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering
| options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower,
| or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with
| the goats.
|
| It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators,
| who found themselves no more employed than they would have been
| if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.
| bluGill wrote:
| With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and
| lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator
| though.
| some_random wrote:
| Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the
| goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other
| than the human lawn mowers.
| bluGill wrote:
| the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at
| noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see
| the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that
| passes bad product.
|
| many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you
| still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine
| doesn't save much labor.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where
| machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at
| identifying patterns and returning if something does, or
| doesn't, fit the pattern.
|
| Try to generate something _new_ based on that pattern, and
| they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass /fail
| reply? They're amazing at that.
| AngryData wrote:
| Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms
| milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth,
| nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on
| for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk
| or high on meth.
| fragmede wrote:
| Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order
| to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as
| yours.
| beloch wrote:
| Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans
| do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It
| certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and
| art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
| masto wrote:
| I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast
| between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the
| love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing
| equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best
| is to let the humans do human things and the machines do
| machine things.
|
| A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring
| ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that
| person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric
| motor just does the job better.
|
| On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese
| inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand
| unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only
| one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an
| inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a
| human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also
| minimizing false positives.
|
| The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans
| are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can
| design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can
| navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like
| half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited
| for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is
| something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the
| environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the
| cheese.
|
| With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle
| ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in
| addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and
| audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but
| also give them objective numerical data on the frequency
| response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to
| recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the
| previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for
| a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer
| can help with that.
| taxicabjesus wrote:
| There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese.
| I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was
| certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it
| was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial
| substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying
| the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet
|
| Contaminants are a common problem in industrial food
| manufacturing: citric acid (fungal contaminants), vitamin C
| (heavy metals), and "enzymes" (?).
|
| I'm glad Italians insist their cheeses be made following the
| traditional methods.
| lblume wrote:
| > I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"
|
| How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source
| correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out
| that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable
| for most people.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > How can you be so certain?
|
| "Vibe diagnosing"
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Maybe it was an allergic reaction to the mold inhibitor?
| Vegetarian rennet and animal rennet are both chymosin.
| ziofill wrote:
| Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating
| them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the
| best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only
| grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on
| their own with some good bread or grilled polenta.
|
| Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're
| cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little chewy chunks.
| qwertox wrote:
| I absolutely love them. I don't like how it melts on pasta, so
| I eat it directly.
| hk__2 wrote:
| I can't really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comte or
| emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months
| Parmigiano and I wouldn't rate one "better" than the other.
| Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best
| eaten on its own.
|
| I'm French and something that surprise me is that both Italy
| and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat
| cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French
| meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) /
| dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as
| antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at
| home people don't really eat cheese on its own.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Why do you think this happens?
|
| In America eating cheese by itself is usually seen as a very
| fancy activity.
|
| I can't think of the last time I had a spread of just cheese
| in the US, and it was probably a fancy place.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| The Co-op food stores in Hanover and Lebanon NH did a March
| madness cheese bracket. We hosted a small bracket party
| with a selection of unfamiliar cheeses for friends to try
| while filling out our brackets.
|
| It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not
| (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly
| refined thing). It was all delicious though!
| hk__2 wrote:
| From what I read [1] this habit of eating cheese as part of
| the meal is a tradition in France since at least the Middle
| Age, although until the end of the XIXth century it was
| eaten after the dessert instead of before. However I can't
| find _why_ this happens in France and not in other cheese-
| loving countries like Switzerland or Italy.
|
| [1]: https://ericbirlouez.fr/index.php/activites/articles/4
| 2-une-... (fr)
| sneak wrote:
| No, the American style of eating cheese by itself is
| anything but a fancy activity.
|
| We usually lean over the sink, with the bag of shredded in
| one hand...
| bromuro wrote:
| I do eat cheese with my Italian family as main course,
| usually when coming back from the Alps with a good amount of
| homemade cheese. The best with potatoes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > (at least in my experience) at home people don't really eat
| cheese on its own.
|
| that's sad. i love at home charcuterie boards and a nice
| bottle of wine. while much more fancy that what my dad did. I
| did grew up with blocks of cheese pretty much always
| available as he loved cheese. and no, we're not from
| Wisconsin
| mauvehaus wrote:
| For those who didn't know, the rind can also be dropped into an
| otherwise ordinary pot of soup and add a lot of flavor.
|
| Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never
| tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing
| look to my eye.
|
| What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| For those who don't know, the rind can also be just plain
| eaten. Maybe I'm just a heathen, but I find it far too
| delicious to ever waste on a pot of soup.
| xandrius wrote:
| I used to just microwave it or bake it, wonderful snack.
| jajko wrote:
| For just raw cheese taste, me and my whole family both older
| and younger (which grew up in eastern europe where absolutely
| none of these was known behind iron curtain, not even as cheap
| stolen bad copies), AOC Gruyere surchoix and aged Gouda are
| top.
|
| From italian its pecorino pepato (specifc, I know) and then
| black truffles variants, usually also of pecorino.
|
| Maybe cheese you mention are more of an acquired taste rather
| than love at first sight, can't tell but will keep trying :)
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| I agree, they're so good on their own for snacking, a really
| good Reggiano has such an interesting flavor, I can't get
| enough. Runners-up for me include gruyere, a dark aged gouda,
| or camembert or reblochon. I just had a piece of locally-
| produced but nothing compares to Reggiano.
|
| Also I always add the rind to my risotto too!
| wrboyce wrote:
| I got home today from my first trip to Italy (we went to Verona
| for Vin Italy) and cheese was at the top of my shopping list of
| things to bring back. As it happens, I'm right now eating some
| 36 month aged Parmigiano Reggiano; absolutely beautiful. The
| food and wine I enjoyed in your country were on another level!
| On the subject of risotto, I had my first ever(!) risotto last
| night: a risotto amarone, and wow! Absolutely incredible, molto
| interessante!
| crazygringo wrote:
| I love them as well, but they seem to be too hard and too
| strong to pair well with bread. They really do seem to work
| best grated into things like pasta, risotto, and soup, or as
| shavings in salad.
|
| I mean, you do you, but you'd find me reaching for a lot of
| other cheeses first to go with my bread.
| xandrius wrote:
| Also Italian, lots of really interesting cheeses out there.
|
| Appenzeller medium, young Asiago, sake trappist cheese, blue
| brie, extra sharp English cheddar, and of course mozzarella and
| halloumi.
|
| I think both the Grana and the Parmiggiano are great in some
| places but not everywhere, so I couldn't pick them as sole
| winners.
| fracus wrote:
| I tried Grana Padano once and my take away was that I would
| never choose that cheese over Parmigiano Reggiano. Isn't it
| just an inferior similar cheese?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Um... but pecorino romano exists...
| talkingtab wrote:
| Cheese, not the kind that comes in plastic bags, is incredibly
| cool and delicious. It is nothing like what most people think of
| as cheese.
|
| There are some youtube videos about people making artisanal
| cheeses:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM102CO8JL0 and
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpROVueIcE
|
| Kids! Do this at home!!! I've been making cheese at home for the
| last year. It is hard - but not as hard as programming and tastes
| much, much, better.
| saltcured wrote:
| I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal
| story.
|
| From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I
| learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People
| were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped
| (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert
| did.
|
| The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to
| articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the
| drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a
| better sniff test.
| kazinator wrote:
| This is like if Toyota were to announce that for each shipping
| car, they kick all the tires, slam the doors, and honk the horn.
|
| It is probably just a joke for show and to fool naive
| competition.
|
| Behind closed doors, they must do some actual quality tests.
| verelo wrote:
| My 100% favourite part of this write up is the mention of "piano
| piano".
|
| In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto
| (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta,
| living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious
| (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to
| communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging
| statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good"
| to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of
| work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano
| piano...".
|
| I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term
| and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it
| slowly".
|
| Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my
| dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me
| when I was working on the house.
| ggambetta wrote:
| "Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I
| guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano
| piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You
| were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was
| telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".
| jacobgkau wrote:
| It's interesting to me that, from what they describe, they still
| sell the cheese regardless of the outcome of this tapping test.
| It's just that they sell it unbranded if it's of the lowest
| quality, and with a different marking for medium quality than
| highest-quality.
|
| I suppose wheels of cheese can last a lot longer than normal
| table cheese, so that's why it makes sense to make this
| distinction.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Curious about this quote: "'My elder colleagues tell me you never
| stop learning, even after 50 years of doing it,' recounted
| Stocchi. 'The day you think you've learned everything is the day
| you'll start making errors.'" - To me this implies that there is
| more variation among the cheese than I'd expect. In this role
| don't you see every likely cheese over 50 years? It seems like a
| static product, where production methods don't change, and that
| should give you very consistent results from tapping.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically
| stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that
| can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can
| also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause
| mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the
| variation in the process but its core input is still very much
| alive and organic so there's only so much they can control it.
| fracus wrote:
| They make it sound really complicated, requiring years of
| mentorship, but really, it was just determining if the sound is
| the same on multiple taps. It would seem pretty obvious if you
| tap over a hollow.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Your job looks really easy to an outsider too, regardless of
| what you do
| susiecambria wrote:
| The sharing of the article and comments: Why I love HN. Thank
| you.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-10 23:00 UTC)