Posted by QueensGambit 6 days ago
Except when I asked someone who makes cheese in Switzerland, they told me almost the opposite (and mostly that they export the junk cheese to the US and keep the good stuff).
As an aside, what are the odds this article was written by AI? It has that feel (minus random bolding and bullet points).
The holes in modern Emmental cheese are created intentionally. In Switzerland the additive used to create them is forbidden. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmental_cheese#Natural_holes_...
This usually happens when one population is discerning and the other is not.
For example, most Americans think Hershey’s is what chocolate is supposed to taste like, because they grew up with it.
Same with the mushy Chorleywood processed bread and most American “cheese”
At the very-local level of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking US food is terrible compared to European food. The US optimizes for volume and cost, Europe leans more towards quality.
Yes, there's a lot of cheap rubbish food in Europe, but those consuming it know it's cheap rubbish.
By contrast, and to your point, most Americans have never experienced really good food, and so it's harder to grasp that their "regular" quality is so low. We don't miss what we've never had.
My local, nothing special, supermarket stocks over 100 species of cheese. I remember going to the US and being confronted either 3 (American, whatever that is, Swiss and Cheddar. Um, which is unlike any cheddar I've ever had. Frankly the biggest difference seemed to be the color (which is artificial).
Think is, you can't describe sailing to someone who has never seen the ocean.
Increased travel, the growth of "American in Europe" YouTube videos, have slowly started permeating though and quality food is starting to appear here and there. But (naturally) its more expensive, so most Americans will be slow to adapt.
In the USA, cheese is either a salad topping, a sandwich/burger topping, or a pizza topping, and not much else. I once bought some pecorino romano to make cacio-e-pepe and regret doing that, it's an overhyped dish.
When was this comparison done?
In the last decade or so American grocery stores have dramatically improved their cheese selections. I don't know if it is 100 different cheeses, but it is pretty darn close. And unusual regional cheeses come in all the time.
Eh, I mean, sure, if you go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe, you’ll find cheese that might rival a discount chain in France at premium prices. If you go to Safeway, Target or Walmart, the cheese will not be anywhere near what a French (or I assume, a Swiss) person would find acceptable.
So does my local co-op that I can walk to.
Or the other bougie store less than a mile away from me.
Within a 1 mile radius I probably have over 200 varieties of cheese to choose from!
And even when buying natural bread without these added “benefits”, it often has high levels of sodium (up to like 200mg per slice).
Bread is one of the easiest, most plain things to make, yet finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward in the States. But I do really want to know which shops and which brand you get, I’d love to find good bread lol.
Then we went to Germany and I finally understood.
Not only can I pop in to the local bakery on the corner (or the next corner, or the next) for the most amazing breads ever, but I could also go to a Rewe or Edeka and get quite good bread that's still head-and-shoulders above anything in America.
My fav right now is a walnut spelt bread roll that I get for 90 cents apiece at Edeka. A bit pricey but it's worth it. Put on some President butter [1] and some cheeses and it's divine!
[1] https://www.president.de/produkte/butter/meersalzbutter-250-...
It's not hard to find a good bakery in any dense area in the US. I have to imagine people claiming otherwise are indulging in Yankee-bashing, a favorite European pastime.
The good bread is in the Santa Cruz mountains. In San Francisco, I’ve only had it in wealthy homes where home staff made it fresh that day.
Sure, you can get good bread here. However it's going to cost you 5x what it costs in Europe and it might take you up to 30 minutes to get too depending on where you live. Most bread in the US is low quality. Most bread in Europe is high quality. There is good bread to be found in the US, and there's bad bread in Europe. But the average bread just isn't even close to being equal.
In my opinion, it’s tasty but also not quite what I would expect bread to be like, mainly because it’s so soft. It is a running joke between us that Chinese teeth can’t chew through European bread (like an actual French baguette).
But agreed, Chinese bread > American bread for flavor at least!
Long island new york, here is a a store chain with out of this world bread.
Most Americans are fine eating stale or preserved bread. (Almost all pre-sliced supermarket bread is the latter.) You just don’t have enough people to spread the cost of baking fresh bread throughout the day outside wealthy communities.
That said, a lot of European bread is also trash. There are simply some bread-loving ones where it isn’t. Similarly, there are places in America with great bread (New Orleans, New York and Miami), and places without (Northern California and the Midwest).
Yes thank you for pointing this out. I've noticed even the bakeries around me (in Switzerland) aren't that great; for me the best are from the farmers markets and even still you have to be discerning for which are actually good. On the other side I've had some fantastic bread in the US from specialty bakeries.
Every supermarket I can locally go to has a bread-on- the shelf section, as well as a very fresh bread section. Not to mention 'bread shops' exist.
Don't underestimate the ability of tourists from anywhere to not understand how to look around a shop.
Finding bread in America that isn't over-overloaded with sugar is very difficult.
Quite a few of my family take their own bread to the US. Of late, the problem has been solved as, apart from work, people just aren't travelling there anymore - for non bread-related reasons, of course. For the US fam that now travel back to the eu (an awful lot) more, they go wild for eu bread: it just doesn't taste like cak, /sp - i mean cake.
Finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward anywhere in EU. It either has sugar or additives or it is cooked at a too low temperature to be useful.
In what way is that bread "not useful"?
Wealthy communities. Upper-middle class, maybe.
That, or an immigrant bakery. (Mexican. Korean. Taiwanese. Japanese.)
The garden variety baguettes in Spain that go for 50 cents are superior to $8 "gourmet, artisanal" bread in the US.
Don't get me wrong, shit's delicious. It's just not what bread should be.
Example of great bread: https://www.ibfoods.com/search.php?search_query=Bread
Yes, a French baguette-type soft white bread is formally "bread", but it is treated as a different/single category here, as "white bread". With examples of typical bread being, say: https://www.hofpfisterei.de/download/Hofpfisterei-Sortiment-... And I don't think the images really carry across the difference (and variety) in texture and density, to someone who simply never had this kind of "non-soft" bread. You can spread cold butter from the fridge on it without breaking it, maybe that gives away a hint towards the difference. Also note the variety of grain: rye, spelt, wheat, barley, oats, in different compositions and degrees of fineness. And this is just one brand/bakery.
Some more "typical German bread" images. I picked types that maybe convey the difference to "white bread" the best in viewing:
https://5-elemente.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/rheinische...
https://heicks-teutenberg.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Honi...
https://img.chefkoch-cdn.de/rezepte/2468131388854443/bilder/...
I would watcher most American literally have never in their live ever seen how 'rezent' Emmentaler is supposed to look. Honestly its hard to get even in Switzerland.
A proper 'rezent' Emmentaler literally has a thick salt crust inside of the holes.
This is typical even in Switzerland, and I wager its better then most 'Swiss' you get in the US:
https://www.migros.ch/en/product/210119408500
But if you want the elite stuff, it looks like this:
https://emmentaler-schaukaeserei.ch/en/shop/produkte/Emmenta...
But to get that, you are going to have to store it a long time, and that reflects in the price. The stuff sold in the US is usually stored much shorter.
It is hard to take you seriously when you spread misinformation.
The Calcium lactate crystals are technically a salt, but not what we would commonly refer to as salt (sodium chloride).
To me this is very obvious when you eat the crystals (they don't taste salty, and they have only a very soft crunch).
And that doesn't really change any argument I made in my post.
Everywhere is like this to some extent - no people can be an expert in all things.
You’re parsing discernment as a value judgement. Don’t do that.
New York City has America’s best bagels. This is because OG bagels are best fresh, and making them fresh multiple times a day takes a lot of work. (They stale super fast because gluten is a bastard. Hence toasting.) To pay for that work at a non-ludicrous cost per bagel, you need lots of reliable demand. That really only happens when you have an ecosystem of people who have been eating bagels all their lives made by folks who have been making them similarly.
You don’t find great bagels outside New York (at an affordable price) because the demand isn’t there. Meanwhile, if you haven’t spent time in New York, you probably don’t know (or care about) the difference. Which means you’re unlikely to give excess patronage to anyone who tries to do it right if they try to do it near you. That doesn’t make anyone outside New York who likes their local bagel wrong; it’s just that economies make it very difficult, and frankly pointless, to replicate the New York bagel elsewhere.
If the people in your town will pay extra only for great cheese and the guys across the pond will pay the same price for mediocre and great cheeses, the deck is stacked. (And to be clear, you can find great Swiss cheeses in America. What you can’t is great Swiss wines.)
Your whole comment below about "discernment" and seeking New York bagels out sounds like a personal preference (bred by familiarity), not actually finding the creme de la creme of bagels.
The same goes for Chicago/New York pizza. It's not special. It's just the pizza you metaphorically grew up with.
Bread by familiarity, surely? Sorry for the awful bun. I mean pun.
It’s one element. The result, however, is highly perishable. You can make it last a full day in the counter, but that fucks with the texture.
> it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer
Sure. Same with various cheeses. Or beef.
Kobe beef is predominantly consumed in Japan. A bit makes it out. But you can generally serve someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time in Japan other wagyu and they’ll be happy. You won’t get away with that with a Kobe aficionado, and there are simply more of those in Japan for self-reïnforcing reasons. (I personally like a range of beef, and while Kobe is great, it’s not something I seek out.)
But not multiple times a day. A New York bagel noticeably stales after a couple hours.
Baguettes are the same, by the way. The little handies? If made plainly, correvtly, they change immeasurably once they cool.
When perishability is measured in tens of minutes’ intervals, your economics require a large city of aficionados. (Not applicable to cheese, obviously.)
Having high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York. The specific type of bagel is, though, because it's a preference rather than a sign of quality. You have fewer bakeries per square mile outside New York, but you have fewer of everything per square mile outside New York. Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods.
The stuff that sells. In most bakeries, that doesn’t cover bagels.
> Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread?
Nobody claimed this.
> high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York
It absolutely is. New York has entire American cities’ worth of people in single city blocks. That drives niche culinary diversity in a way that’s impossible to sustain anywhere else in America.
> Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods
Again, never contested. But not as wide a variety. You can’t profitably make every sort of baked good fresh every few hours in a town smaller than a few hundred thousand. You can find that within walking distance for bagels, cubanos, naan and dumplings in a lot of Manhattan.
> New York City has America’s best bagels
That's a big claim.
You say it's because they are best fresh -- are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels? That's what I get from your first comment, but then you moved the goalposts a bit by qualifying "at an affordable price." So maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?
I see there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel ;).
Of the kind that stale in two hours? Yes. It wouldn’t be economical.
> maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?
Never say never, but I haven’t seen it. I have seen private chefs pull it off. But they basically required a sous chef to deal with the lye and boiling.
> there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel
Yup :). (I qualified the first reference with OG, btw.)
But I’m going further. You can’t make a New York bagel outside New York without hundreds of customers reliably streaming through the door who will fuck off if you try to take a shortcut.
Other cities have great bagels. (Montrèal.) But they’re not that. That’s what I mean by discernment. Literally, discerning one thing from another. If you’ve eaten New York bagels for a stretch, you can discern them from others. If you like that, you’ll seek it out, rewarding those who do the work and punishing those who dope them with preservatives. That creates symbiosis between the bagel eater and maker.
Same with cheese. Same with barbecue. Or chivitos or chaat or all the other local, perishable yummies that are peculiar in an infuriatingly-tedious way.
People line to before they open and the bagels are quickly sold out in a mad rush.
There is a French bakery close to me in Seattle there makes croissants in the morning and they sell out in less than 2 hours. IMHO they are the best croissants in the city, although we have quite a few good local bakeries.
I love this!
I also remember Johnny's having pretty good corn beef hash. 90% of the corn beef hash here on the west coast is way under seasoned.
The bagels at Rosenfeld aren't the exact same as NYC (water yada yada) but they are quality wise really good and the toppings are amazing.
Random fact - to pay for my trips I'd right up a patent application on my Windows 8.1 tablet on the red eye JetBlue flight. My LD relationship is why I hold so many patents!
Not arrogant, just a fact of life.
In the same way that the average Dutch palate is content with food produce of mediocre quality and taste, and is satisfied with food that would make the average French or Italian wince.
Being discerning about the quality of your food is something you pick-up intuitively from birth. Some cultures have it, others don't.
So it makes sense for a Swiss cheese maker to export a more marketable cheese, which are generally less strong and younger than the local one. Just like there's an export Guinness or Kilkenny that different from one you'd get in Ireland.
Of note: cheese label are strongly protected in Europe; you cannot legally sell an AOP labelled cheese without adhering to strict guideline about the raw material (including geographic provenance) and processing.
My son and I travel all over the US for various competitions, and there are certain regions where he refuses to get OJ because of the flavor differences.
I've just visited New Orleans, and the selection of cheese available in supermarkets was extremely limited. I recall the same issue from past visits elsewhere in the US. The fist time I visited I was horrified to see fake Bega cheese.
For more choice in New Orleans I would have needed to go to a cheese shop/restaurant chain called the St James Cheese Company (I didn't visit it).
I watched someone cooking a hamburger grab a slice of processed cheese (looked like a standard individual plastic packaged slice to me) and place it on top of the burger to melt (admittedly it turned out fine).
Oh, and all the milk I found in New Orleans was ultra-pasteurised (abominable taste) - I didn't see any standard/HTST pasteurized milk. Apparently shelflife is more important than taste. For comparison, Supermarket milk is pasteurized here in NZ (not ultra except for longlife tetrapack) and unpasteurized milk is available in Christchurch (not at supermarket, I think in a shop in St Martins or from dairy 30km out of Christchurch).
I admit that here in Christchurch for better imported cheeses I need to go to a cheesemonger. At my local supermarket today I didn't buy a yummy local aged gouda (Meyer) because it was USD40/kg : instead I bought 1 double-cream Brie (Mainland), 1 goatsmilk feta (Foodsnob - Bulgarian - cheap on special), and some "smoked flavour" processed cheese slices (Chesdale - plastic but I like it!).
For Emmentaler, the supermarket has "Swiss cheese" which isn't great. They have an imported brand from Germany Emborg Emmentaler Swiss Cheese block 200g NZD9.69 (USD12.7/lb) which you wouldn't buy for its flavour.
This state is a backwater shithole that reminds me of a war-torn Eastern European country, even in New Orleans (which to be fair, is quite small) I wouldn't let it be a typical example of the kind of variety you can find in a modern American city.
Kraft makes a plastic wrapped slice that is "cheese food", however they also make an American cheese slice that is actual cheese. I suspect you saw the latter.
https://www.kraftheinz.com/kraft-deli-deluxe/products/000210...
That sounds like the market expressing the collective opinion that their cheese is not miles better than what other people make.
On a related note, the best seems to be considered Emmentaler AOC, and it does not seem especially difficult to purchase outside of Switzerland.
I'm quite fond of the Belper Knolle, but even that ain't particularly obscure.
…why? Gruyère and Appenzeller are delicious. They’re also well known. My favorite blue in the world is Point Reyes. Controversial when I’m in France. But not some secret undiscovered jewel.
Some other people, maybe. But not all other people.
people who produce and sell stuff follow profit maximization. Colombia sells its best coffee on the export market because there it will command the highest prices. The people who live in wine growing regions (agricultural) do not have the disposable income to afford expensive wines, so they are shipped to cities. Great croissants are sold locally because they don't last long being shipped. It's not more than profit maximization.
Luxury goods are sold worldwide even to hell hole countries, because there's people there who can afford them.
Average and means have no significance in this matter. There are more Americans who can afford cheese from Switzerland than there are Swiss people.
So who can afford it? In Switzerland, everyone.
But if you can send the cheap stuff and get the same price why not do that and keep the high quality items for the local market?
Southern Europeans export their tasteless tomatoes to Northern Europe because people there don’t value tasty tomatoes that much. So southern Europeans keep the good vegetables for themselves.
what I describe holds true because I didn't fall into the trap you are trying to dig me out of.
I said: the sellers profit maximize. What you are saying only makes a difference in who they sell to... in order to, as I said, profit maximize.
Southern European summers have become too hot to grow tomatoes, so during the summer they have to be imported. The native ones are only available during the winter - when they are indeed exported back up as well.
It's the other way around. The problem is that mass-market tomato varieties have been selected and bred for a long shelf life - which led to them losing taste because breeders didn't care about taste, only about durability [1]. And the flavors aren't the only thing that went away, the second breeding focus on yield led to tomatoes that don't have as much sugar any more because there's only so much sugar a single plant can make.
So if you want to ship tomatoes to Nothern European countries that actually last a few days of display time on the shelf before going bad, you'll want to breed varieties with less taste. If you were to ship tasty tomatoes, probably half the shipment would go bad before ever reaching the store.
And that's not just valid for tomatoes, it's valid for all sorts of agricultural products - including meat. You're only going to get the truly good stuff if you go local and pay the surcharge for varieties and breeds that are "less efficient" to grow but yield more flavor.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-tomatoes-got-bla...
And basically you’re saying the same as I am. If Northern Europeans would value taste enough, they’d be happy to pay double (since 50% of the shipment would go bad as you write).
The canton of Bern makes an absolutely excellent Emmantaler. It’s the original Swiss cheese as brought to America by 19th-century Swiss immigrants to Wisconsin.
"Swiss cheese" is supposed to be similar to Emmentaler (or inspired from it?). But the fact that Swiss Emmentaler counts as Swiss cheese does not mean that Swiss cheese counts as Emmentaler, or is from Switzerland at all.
Perhaps we can ask Italy what they do with tomatoes and parmigiano.
The reason why I might give it some credence is twofold
1. I would suppose travel from point X to point Y might lead to degradation of quality and thus the top quality leaving at X might be passable when arriving at Y.
2. I suppose there are different income levels involved, Danes are pretty parsimonious.
I don't think most of them actually care about having the best, they care about having passable quality which is of course much better than a middle class person will have access to in the U.S, but perhaps they export the best and premium because obviously with a world wide market there would be enough really upper-scale rich buyers to make it worthwhile to do so.
I have to say I don't really care much, but I think there may be scenarios in which a large portion of the best quality of a nation's produce gets exported (obviously not all of it, but a large portion) and am interested in that as how economics works.
As far as anecdotes however, my Italian ex-wife said the best Italian food she ever had was at a fancy restaurant we went to in Prague. I thought it was good but I don't much care past a certain point, so I didn't notice. My favorite was a small restaurant in Vomero that just made the same two dishes all day long and all the workers came to eat there. I like Danish pork, but generally stuff like flæskesteg, which historically was yes, a luxury good, but a luxury good for peasants. So I think probably not the best.
Yes definitely anything I have eaten in Danish or Italian dishes in their homeland was better than what I ate in those culinary traditions in the U.S or England, but I doubt that was because I had a great sampling to choose from and could decide what was what based only on my experience.
For Emmantaler? Or cheese in general?
Switzerland produces up to 1000 varieties of cheese (still nothing compared to what France produces but its a tiny country comparatively), and literally 1 semi famous variety has holes. Its not what most Swiss folks buy most of the time, that would be ie well aged AOP Gruyere or Appenzeller for example (much much better taste experience than even best Emmental can ever produce).
Nonsense. Swiss cheese has a particular appearance and taste profile in the US.
If you tried to sell something as "Swiss cheese" that was bright yellow and solid, you'd be laughed at.
Would you believe Australians call cheddar "tasty cheese"?
For example, you could say that something "looks like swiss cheese" when it has a lot of holes in it, like very old clothing. It's often used slightly ironic, but that's not due to what you state.
> In the U.S., we call it “Swiss” cheese, while in Switzerland, it’s known as Emmental.
Of course cheese with holes in it isn't the only type of cheese they make
Amusingly, the danish pastry would be called "wienerbrød" meaning: bread from Vienna. like the Viennese only made one type of pastry...
Luckily, the Viennese don't call it something-from-somewhere, so the chain ends at 3. I wonder if there is a 4-chain of terms anywhere.
All countries, without exception, do something unpleasant to an ingredient or dish that the rest of the world will cry foul over. It is the way of things.
All sources I can find have cheddar #1 and mozzarella either #2 or #3 (with cream cheese #2 when moz is #3) in the US. American is behind them and Swiss is way back behind a bunch of other things including Jack and various blends.
Swiss/American/Cheddar might be the big three for a particular sandwich shop, but...
I'm quite partial to Somerset brie and I'm putting my head up over the parapet here 8)
(For a similar effect in respect of Europe, see the median Russian tourist summarizing Western Europe.)
And strong currencies. You don’t get this bias in either, generally.
> on the other hand, European countries have far less income inequality than the US, and less poverty
Irrelevant. I’m not saying one is superior to the other. Just that the median European tourist probably isn’t experiencing any American city or town like the median American who lives there.
This is partly due to tourist effects. But it’s also due to cost. After GDP/capita differentials and FX effects, you’re comparing drastically different worlds. (Same for Americans traveling to Europe and, outside a few pricy capitals, generally finding a cheap, luxurious holiday.)
But lower median disposable income. Europe mostly just poor.
At most it adds a slight amount of acidity and makes for a very attractive melting property. There’s not really anything disgusting about it for most people because most people find its melting properties to be a positive.
Hating American cheese is an affect people adopt for the same reason people adopt an affect of hating mayo: certain cultural elements tell them to.
In practice, unless you are going to look specifically for it, Kraft, Velveeta et. al. are more than happy to sell you "American cheese product" which does not meet FDA standards for labeling for American cheese, and in practice a lot of people criticizing American cheese are actually criticizing cheese product, which is what is super easy to find both in American supermarkets and abroad.
Europeans also generally take offense at some of the stuff in American supermarkets that has implied labeling like European cheese, like the powdered Kraft Parmesan.
What's crazy is Europe allowing 5% non-milk-fat/vegetable fat products to be called "ice cream". Thankfully in America it has to be 10% milkfat at least.
It is a sleight of hand that it says American, but it specifically does not say American cheese as a single phrase.
[0]https://www.kraftheinz.com/kraft-deli-deluxe/products/000210...
You may not like it, but it is the public face of American cheese.
A good way to think about American Cheese is to consider if instead of it being a mass produced, highly available product, it was made by Thomas Keller and served in a dish at The French Laundry. Then we would call it “molecular gastronomy” and it would be a nice littler touch to some dish.
Although they are not the same cheese, they are quite close in texture and flavour and are fairly interchangeable to the point where I don't think a significant number of people could tell you which was which.
There is also the Swiss Cheese Model which is when several unfortunate events all line up to cause a major incident.
TIL that Gruyere from France is different to Swiss and it must have holes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruy%C3%A8re_cheese > The PGI documentation also requires that French Gruyère has holes "ranging in size from that of a pea to a cherry", a significant departure from the Swiss original. Peter Ungphakorn, a Swiss local and an international trade expert, comments that the French Comté cheese could be a closer match to the Swiss version.
And there is a good image of Gruyere with holes here, https://classicfinefoods.co.uk/dairy/5713-french-gruyere-pgi...
A fun fact: the Dutch don't usually think of Emmentaler when you say 'Zwitserse kaas', but of these paper shakers filled with grated Schabziger:
https://www.gourmandgazette.nl/2023/12/08/zwitserse-kaas/
Those have been sold as 'Zwitserse strooikaas' for decades.
I've put a lengthier response to the parent post, but look at https://classicfinefoods.co.uk/dairy/5713-french-gruyere-pgi... as that may solve our quandary.
Even in Italian (just across the border!) it was not uncommon to hear expressions like "full of holes like groviera", and it seems in French it's the same based on the existence of this Wikipedia page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxe_du_fromage_%C3%A0_tro...
Language is just strange.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruy%C3%A8re_fran%C3%A7ais
They also have a cheese similar to the Gruyère from Switzerland, but with a different name (the Gruyère part dropped from the name over time):
I remember a major ad campaign when proper imported "Emmental" was rebranded as "Emmentaler" because the former name was becoming generic, and a related ad campaign about positioning and promoting Emmentaler as one of several kinds of "Swiss Cheese" along with Gruyere, Sbrinz and maybe a fourth one I don't recollect.
It’s also called Emmentaler (from Emmental) in Switzerland.
I always assumed we were just calling Emmental the wrong thing. Then again most of what we call Gruyère is a somewhat industrialized store-bought thing that arguably tastes like neither Emmental not Gruyère (but at least it has holes, I guess). And to boot, I'm pretty sure we call "Gruyère" some of the products that are labeled as Emmental anyway.
In retrospect, it makes sense we'd have our "own" given how finicky we are with names (of things we produce).
Edit: turns out we've also bastardized Emmental anyway.
Switzerland is an entire country with sodding great mountains and lakes, multiple towns, cities and a lot of worryingly loved leather clothing.
How on earth can you reduce a nation that supplies the rather lovely Swiss Guard to the Vatican and rather a lot more (that word is working quite hard at this point and perspiring very heavily) to the entire world to ... cheese.
I suggest you don't apply for any jobs in marketing. Your talents will be wasted, should any be found 8)
That is... staggering to me.
OTOH, I have seen people genuinely ask "why is the Mexican language called 'Spanish'?"
Swiss cheese usually refers to Emmentaler. It comes from the Emme Valley, in Bern canton. It’s delicious and one of the OG three of Depression-era fondue. (Gruyère and Appenzeller. Vacherin can come too.)
It’s called Swiss cheese because Wisconsin has a sizable 19th century ethnically Swiss diaspora. (Wisconsin also has a diaspora from Parma. It’s suspected the soft cheese they make is closer to what Parmesan was before WWII than Parmigiano Reggiano, though I personally find the latter tastier.)
Type. And there are lots of non-Swiss Emmantaler producers.
Did someone put a whole cheese in MNR to track the holes? (I guess an ultrasound image device is cheaper. Is it possible to use a CT adding contrast to the cheese?)
I am not familiar with Lacey Swiss so no opinion on that one.
So the proper way is to cut half the cheese out, say that holes are NECESSARY and IMPORTANT - and then sell twice as much as before. They are a genius people.
Source: am Swiss, live in Emmental
For Emmentaler?
> With your agreement, we and our 937 partners ...
937? That is insane. That is basically spyware.
