What does this all mean?

one cheesemaker was selling Parmesan cheese that didn’t contain any Parmesan, but it was much more click-baity to scare people into reading about wood pulp in their shredded cheese. (It didn’t help that the animated graphic at the top of the Bloomberg story was of a cheese grater grinding down a tree stump.)

Cellulose can be extracted from wood pulp and is FDA approved as an anticaking agent for shredded cheese. Not just Parmesan. It’s listed on your bag of shredded cheese. Go ahead and look. I’ll wait.

Without anti-caking agents, shredded cheese would become big clumps.

You can eliminate cellulose from your cheese diet by shredding cheese yourself.

Also, cheese shredded off the block is supposed to melt easier. The anti-caking agents — potato starch is another common addition — hamper the melting process.

In a blind test, I doubt I could have picked out the Sargento Off The Block traditional cut shreds from the cheese I shredded off a block.

Overall winner: Combine Sargento’s whole milk mozzarella and pizzeria shredded blends.

Runner up: Shredding a blend of cheeses yourself. In this case it was Dupont whole milk mozzarella and Crystal Farms provolone and medium cheddar.

I tested 14 individual-sized pizzas with just cheese toppings and made two 12-inch pizzas that were half sausage and half pepperoni.

For the individual pizzas I measured 40 grams of Ragu Homestyle Pizza Sauce and 40 grams of cheese. The whole milk and pizza blend shreds from Sargento and the whole milk block from Dupont were the best all around performers when considering visual appeal, texture and flavor.

I don’t measure sauce or cheese when making pizza at home. I just splash and drop on the amount that looks right. This is how I made the 12inch pizzas with sausage and pepperoni toppings. I used a blend of the Sargento whole milk and pizzeria shreds for one and a blend of whole milk mozzarella, provolone and medium cheddar shredded from blocks for the other.

I couldn’t tell the difference in the finished pizzas. Both were delicious.

So, if you don’t want to shred your own cheese, grab a bag of whole milk mozzarella and pizzeria blend from Sargento and mix them together. If you can’t be bothered to even take that extra step, then just place your online pizza order because you shouldn’t be making pizza at home.

Bonus: Ricotta as a cheese topping

While provolone and cheddar commonly were listed as good additions to mozzarella, a post titled “How to Pick the Perfect Cheese for Pizza” on wisconsincheese.com suggested adding ricotta, either by itself or mixed 1:1 with mozzarella.

I tried blending ricotta with mozzarella, but spreading it on the pizza was tricky as it squished the sauce to the edges. I found better success by mixing ricotta with the sauce, then sprinkling shredded cheese on top.

As with mozzarella, whole milk ricotta tasted better than part-skim.

Both gave the pizza a lasagna-like quality.

I happen to like ricotta, so I found the addition tasty. If you hate ricotta, you won’t agree.

Contact Daniel Higgins dphiggin@gannett.com. Follow @HigginsEats on Twitter and Instagram and like on Facebook.

DANIEL HIGGINS/USA TODAY NETWORK-WISCONSIN One pizza was made from bags of pre-shredded cheese the other from cheese shredded off the blocks. Do you see a big difference? (Cheese shredded from blocks is on the left.)

DANIEL HIGGINS/USA TODAY NETWORK-WISCONSIN After making 16 pizzas for a Higgins Eats Ingestigative test of cheese toppings, my biggest takeaway is that a good homemade crust makes a more noticeable difference than the cheese selection.