Pizza cheese made to please
Tastiest cheese for homemade pizza? Plus, Detroit-style pizza puts brick cheese in spotlight.
All right, my Higgins Eats superheroes — that’s everyone who’s answered the call to be the household cook during this pandemic — time for another No Budget Cooking Series ingestigative report. This time we’ll determine if it’s worth grabbing something other than a bag of pre-shredded, part-skim mozzarella to top a homemade pizza. To shred cheese yourself or not? Should you buy whole milk mozzarella? Are blends better than all-mozz?
These are questions that keep me up at night. OK, maybe not, but I’ve lost a few hours to internet searches on the topic. Let’s grab some pizza sauce, crusts and cheese and head to my less-than-impressive kitchen and put internet “facts” to the test.
This is where I should launch into methodology and other details about the tests, but I know by now you’re thinking “get to the results already.” Being a food reporter of the people, I’ll skip all that and just tell you which cheeses were used in testing:
Sargento Foods Off The Block traditional cut shreds — part-skim mozzarella, whole milk mozzarella, and 4 Cheese Pizzeria.
Crystal Farms Dairy shreds — partskim mozzarella, whole milk mozzarella, and pizza blend.
Crystal Farms Dairy blocks — partskim mozzarella, provolone, and medium cheddar.
DuPont Cheese block — whole milk mozzarella.
Part-skim vs whole milk mozzarella
Winner: Whole milk mozzarella (Sargento and Dupont tie), as long as you’re more interested in flavor than visuals.
In-depth: Part-skim cheeses tended to brown quicker, with Sargento’s shreds producing the most Instagramable cheese pizza pic. Though, the block of Dupont whole milk mozzarella produced a nice golden brown color.
Whole milk mozzarellas provided more gooey and flavorful bites. I even coaxed a tiny squeak from Sargento’s shred that also added a hint of saltiness to the pizza.
Whole milk reportedly melts better, but the difference overall was minimally noticeable. The most striking contrast was in Crystal Farms shreds with a few part-skim mozzarella pieces holding shape while the whole milk formed a more uniform topping. But that’s if you take the time to look closely at the edges.
Some articles wrote that whole milk produces greasy pools on the surface, which can be unappetizing. Again, there weren’t huge puddles or significantly more than the part-skim cheeses. I was testing single-serving size pizzas, so it might be more noticeable on a large pizza.
All mozzarella vs cheese blend
Winner: Sargento Off the Block 4 Cheese Pizzeria provided a hint more flavor.
In-depth: A group of food scientists published a study in 2014 on the best cheese for pizza. Their tests confirmed that mozzarella is the best but adding a smattering of cheeses like provolone and cheddar makes it better. .
Sargento’s blend of low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella, cheddar, provolone with smoke flavor and non-smoked provolone provided a nice hint of smokiness and slight cheddar sharpness. But that was only noticeable when making a cheese pizza. Sausage and pepperoni toppings drowned out the hints of those flavors.
Somehow the Crystal Farms pizza blend was less flavorful than its partskim mozzarella shreds.
I made custom blends shredded from blocks of provolone and medium cheddar. One blend used part-skim and the other used whole milk mozzarella. Neither matched the Sargento blend for flavor. Experimenting with cheeses from different cheesemakers may elevate results.
Shreds vs blocks
Winner: Tie between the whole milk mozzarella Sargento Off The Block traditional cut shreds and the block of Dupont whole milk mozzarella. Since Sargento
is already shredded, give it the advantage in a tiebreaker scenario.
In-depth: Remember the Great Cellulose Scare of 2016? That’s the year when the internet buzzed with “news” that there’s wood pulp in Parmesan after a Bloomberg Business in-depth report. The report’s real news was that