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Let's start with the obvious, which is that mozzarella is the best cheese for pizza, says
science. Seriously, in this 2014 study, researchers found that only mozzarella or a cheese blend
based on mozzarella will provide the browning and stretching properties that most people
expect of pizza. But what kind of mozz? Mozzarella comes in some different forms. I'm gonna show
you experiments with five of them. To me there is a clear winner, but certainly it depends
on your tastes and what style of pizza you're trying to make.
Let's start with mozzarella in its purest form — fresh mozzarella. What exactly is
fresh mozz? Well, let's ask an expert.
"So I'm John Lucey, I'm a professor here in the food science department here at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison."
Yes, it's kinda funny that we're talking to an Irishman living in the American Midwest
about an Italian cheese, but Dr. Lucey knows his stuff, and they know from cheese in Wisconsin.
But yeah, he says of course, historically mozz is from Italy.
"In many cases they think it was probably made, originally, from water buffalo. So that
mozzarella would look more like the fresh mozzarella that we might use maybe on salads
and things like that — kinda soft, high-moisture, milky, because the water buffalo produces
milk that's a lot of fat, high-fat product."
I always think that fresh mozz tastes like milk solidified, which is to say it's sweet,
it's fresh, it's subtle, and most significantly for pizza-making, it is wet. You can see some
of the whey spilling out of there before I've even cut into it, and yeah, people usually
cut or tear fresh mozz rather than shred it, because watch what happens when I shred it.
It just shmooshes. It's too soft. She cannae take the strain, capt'n.
Now I'm gonna put this on a pizza, and I'm doing what you could call a New York-style
pizza, which is very wide and very thin, and has a solid sheet of cheese across the entire
top. I'll bake it on my pre-heated pizza steel at 550 F convection, that's like 290 C. That's
about as hot has anyone can get a home oven.
And that looks pretty nice, but when I bite into it, that pizza is wet. Not moist; wet.
The crust is unappetizingly soggy. There is simply too much water in fresh mozz for this
style pizza.
There are, of course, other styles of pizza, and you can get a really good one right here
in beautiful Macon, Georgia, at Just Tap'd. We're a long way from Naples, but Corey here
is making a damn fine Neapolitan-style pizza.
That sauce is just pureed San Marzano tomatoes, straight out of the can with a little seasoning
in it. On goes some fresh basil leaves, and here comes the fresh mozzarella. He likes
to put on big chunks over the basil to protect it, but note how he is not covering that pizza
with cheese. I would say the biggest single difference between Neapolitan-style and New
York-style is this: Neapolitan-style has much less cheese — splotches of cheese, rather
than a sheet of cheese. Why? Because Neapolitan style is made with fresh mozz, and you can't
put too much fresh mozz on a pizza without it getting soggy.
By the way, check out these tabletop ovens they've got at Just Tap'd. 700 F convection
— that gets you a product strikingly similar to that from a wood-fired brick oven. This
innovation is rapidly improving the quality of barroom pizza all over the world, and for
that I am grateful. Delicious.
But say you want to make a different style of pizza — you might want to turn to the
kind of mozzarella they developed not in Italy, but right here in the United States. It was
after the Second World War, when American soldiers who'd fought their way through Italy
brought their new taste for pizza home to big dairy-producing regions like Wisconsin,
where Dr. Lucey is. In the broader post-war drive toward mass production, they found that
fresh mozz simply had problems. It's just too wet and soft to work with on a commercial
scale — it's messy and it's not very shelf-stable.
So, American cheese-makers in the Midwest invented low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella
— often referred to in the cheese industry simply as "pizza cheese." By removing some
of the fat and a lot of the whey, they got a firmer, more stable product that's better
for mass production. How did they get the moisture out?
"You standardize the milk to a little bit lower fat content — that's the first step.
The process then involves adding rennet, which is an enzyme that coagulates the milk, but
it also adds particular bacterial cultures that ferment the lactose that's present in
the milk, and they drop the pH down. They'll then take it and put it into a cooker or a
stretcher, and then they'll warm it up — the current temperature's probably around 60 degrees
C, and they'll heat it up to that kind of temperature. It's kind of like a heating or
a pasteurizing type of step. It inactivates some of the bacteria and enzymes in the product
and it helps to extend the shelf-life."
And check out the New York-style pizza I made with it. Nice browning on the cheese. Crust
is crispy and dry. The cheese itself is firmer and almost has a little snap to it when it's
cooled down a little bit. That snap is why I love lukewarm pizza.
OK, now you might be wondering, why not just use fresh mozz and then squeeze the moisture
out? Which you can do. You just slice it up, you press on it with some paper towels or
something, and that is much drier. But let's go back to what Dr. Lucey was saying. The
manufactures of low-moisture mozz do not squeeze the moisture out physically. They do it chemically.
First they do it with the enzyme rennet, which is what all cheese starts with, and then they
squeeze out more moisture with acid, and that affects the taste, not just the texture. With
a more traditional low-moisture pizza cheese like this one made by Grande in Wisconsin,
they're acidifying the cheese with bacteria — fermentation.
Polly-O, another very popular pizza cheese made in the New York area, does it with vinegar
instead.
"So historically, if you think about the roots of some of these cheeses, vinegary or sour
wine would have been a very common product around to acidify, rather than adding some
bacteria to do it. So it's very common."
But regardless of how you acidify it, low-moisture mozzarella has a sharper taste than the fresh
stuff. You cannot replicate that taste by just squeezing the water out of fresh mozz,
and those more acidic qualities are key to New York-style pizza, which is my main jam.
Another feature of New York-style pizza is that it's often made with full-fat low-moisture
mozz, not part-skim. If you go to pizzamaking.com, a lot of the New York-style pizza cooks there
refer to it by the initialism WMLM — whole milk low moisture. Relative to the part-skim
kind, this is a much harder product to find in grocery stories, and Dr. Lucey says there's
a reason for that, the first being the grease layer that you can get from a higher-fat cheese.
"That might not be what everybody really likes, you know, in terms of the general consumers.
They might not want to be too greasy on the pizza. The second thing too, is that when
you take out the fat, the cheese tends to be firmer. If you've ever bought low-moisture,
part-skim in the store, you'll see it's kinda firm when it's young, and it's easy to cut,
it's easy to shred. So the machine — what we call the machinability factor for a large-scale
manufacturer or large-scale conversion into shreds is a lot easier."
All that said, I'm hardly the only person who prefers the rich flavor that you get from
a full-fat cheese, but where do you get it? If it's not in the cheese case at the grocery
store, they might have at the deli counter, which is where I got this: Boar's Head whole-milk,
low-moisture cheese.
When I bake a pizza with this, yeah, I get some grease, but to me, flavor-wise, that
is absolutely delicious, really superior to the part-skim cheese. Though the Boar's Head
brand is not my favorite pizza cheese. I can't get my favorite pizza cheese anymore. I used
use this full-fat low-moisture Galbani mozz that they sold molded into sticks for string
cheese. This is an unexpected form in which you might be able to get the product that
you're after. That was the best cheese for pizza I was ever able to buy at my grocery
store here in Macon, Georgia, but it seems that Galbani is only selling the part-skim
sticks now, and when I requested an interview with them about all of this, they declined.
Whenever I talk about my struggle to find full-fat, low-moisture mozzarella here in
my small Southern city, I always get people telling me that I should buy this. Indeed,
I can buy this here, and it is a full-fat mozz. Polly-O is a very popular brand with
New York-style pizza joints, but this is not Polly-O's low moisture cheese. This is: They
only sell it in giant loafs for commercial use, so if you're gonna get it from a store,
you're gonna get it at the deli counter. That is not this. I'm not totally sure what this
is, but if you put it side-by-side with a true low-moisture mozz, you can see how much
softer and wetter it is. I would call it "medium moisture," and I don't really like it for
pizza. It has this weird property where it rises a lot in the oven, which tends to make
it boil over, and that pizza is a little wet. I'm also not wild about the flavor either.
I don't know what this cheese is that they sell retail, but it is not the same cheese
that they sell in big 8-pound loafs to pizza shops. If you don't believe me, look: They
don't even have the same nutritional facts listed. It's not the same product. I have
sent many queries about this to both Polly-O and to its parent company, Kraft Heinz, and
I have received no response, across months.
If you live in the U.S., there is one place where you almost certainly can find whole-milk,
low- moisture mozz, and that is Walmart. They make this. I do not think it's a very good
cheese, but at least it's the right style, assuming that this is the style you're after,
which I usually am. But if you live in a big city, you might have lots of better options.
Certainly, you can always fall back on the part-skim low-moisture mozz, which you might
like better anyway, and it's ubiquitous. Also ubiquitous is the same cheese sold in pre-shredded
form, which is the last option we shall explore today. It's very tempting. You just buy a
bag, open it up and shake it on, but there's a problem. This bag doesn't just contain cheese.
It also contains an anti-caking blend — in this case, cornstarch, potato starch and calcium
sulfate.
"If you didn't add an anti-caking agent — whether it's starch or something else — to it, you'd
put it in a bag and if, you know, that bag goes in the fridge, after awhile it just kinda
collects as a ball."
Yeah, so the anti-caking powder can prevent that from happening, but there is a catch
— it can interfere with the melting and browning of the cheese.
"Those materials themselves might not melt at the temperatures that we're going the pizza-baking
at. And if there's too much on them, it's almost like you've kinda battered or breaded
your shreds. The outside doesn't really melt, even if the inside of the cheese wants to
melt at the temperature. So that could be one issue. The second issue is they may also
soak up moisture that is released during the baking process. And because they soak up the
moisture, the surface becomes too dry. And if it becomes too dry then you're likely to
have it like — almost like your toasting it."
And the latter scenario is clearly what happened to my pie here. By the time that pizza was
done, the pre-shredded cheese was burned.
This does not mean that you can't make a good pizza with pre-shredded cheese. You absolutely
can. Dr. Lucey says this is simply a quality-control issue at the factory — some producers just
put in way too much of that anti-caking mix. Maybe they don't care that it's gonna mess
up your pizza — they just care about how their product looks on the shelf. All I can
tell you is that if one brand of cheese isn't working for you, then try another. There's
lots of options, and they're all made in slightly different ways.
Pizza, in its purest form, is such a simple thing, and like all simple things, very small
differences in ingredient quality can make a really really big difference in the final
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luck trying to find the right cheese for your pizza. And really, when you do, and you bake
your pizza, please tag me on it. These people do on Instagram. It's awesome, I love it.