This is a fucking culinary crime.
I mean to be clear I’m from altoona and I’ve never seen pizza like this.
I mean, sandwich bread, tomato sauce, ham and cheese on top, it’s not a pizza, it’s a microwaved 3am sandwich
Yup. This is a stoner snack.
True that
Not cheese. Kraft fucking singles
Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.
That actually makes them super useful in making a cheese sauce.
Add a few slices to a queso and it will not break.
You fat. Smooth cheesey sauce that comes out perfect every time.
You can make sodium citrate with lemon juice and baking soda. Lime juice also works. Really any citric acid.
Anyway, you don’t need much to make cheese melt smoothly.
We literally bought a can of sodium citrate to adulterate cheese at home.
Our nacho cheese is fucking amazing, and the cheese-milk ratio is absurd compared to what we used to be able to get. We can do 40% milk 60% cheddar and it still works. We stir in garlic, chili, cumin, salt and pepper, too.
You fat
Rude
💀 I also read it that way
Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.
No, if it was just cheese that’s been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate it would be pasteurized process cheese. A couple other additional additives are acceptable.
When it has other additives but is at least half cheese by weight it’s pasteurized process cheese food.
When it’s pasteurized process cheese product it’s not meeting any of those standards. Often because it’s less than half cheese or an addictive outside the accepted list to meet the other definitions is being used. Milk protein concentrate is an example, but also increasing the fat content with something like vegetable oil or adding flavoring agents to make the result taste more like cheese.
The FDA caught Kraft singles not meeting the definition of pasteurized process cheese food something like 20 years ago which is why it’s labeled a pasteurized process cheese product.
For any curious, the sodium citrate is an emulsifying agents that helps the natural cheeses used melt together smoothly, and pasteurization was originally done to prolong the life of the resultant mixed cheese as the whole original point of American cheese was to reprocess ends and scraps into something homogeneous and comparatively safe for long distance overland transport before refrigerated trucks were a thing.
When night munchies comes… You don’t care about quality of ingredients, anyway it’s just a slapstick sandwich and not a pizza, only “crime” they do is calling it pizza and pricing it as such, if it was marketed as cheap slapstick sandwiches on the go, i don’t think anyone would have problems with that
There’s also the issue of Kraft being a shite company.
Every person I’ve shared Altoona pizza with ironically has ended up unironically liking it, so I don’t know anymore. I’ve never actually had it myself. Maybe this isn’t any worse than Hawaiian pizza or cauliflower crust pizza?
At the end of the day though, this is just a regional food - like Cincinnati chili or Chicago hot dog - only after all the good ideas are taken, this was what was left. If they can sell one to everybody passing through Altoona just once, they’ve made a fair amount of money.
Cincinnati chili is beloved by Cincinnati, though…
And they say white people have no culture.
Grand sweeping gesture
No-one ever talks about white on white violence
Would you like a stroke?
Say what?
Would you like a pizza with a side of stroke hun?
Nah, but can I get it will a double pounder heart attack? And a side of diarrhea? I’m trying to keep my height to weight ratio.
Mayon-egg
Heart disease
I don’t think it’s any less healthy than ordinary pizza. Just tastes like trash.
Cheddar has more calories and fat than mozzarella. It’s also more processed and has more additives.
That doesn’t look like any cheddar I’ve ever seen
“american” cheese is called cheddar in pretty much everywhere I’ve been around the globe.
There must not be much overlap in the countries we’ve visited then, because I’ve never seen this personally; one of the things I was glad for when I returned to the UK after while backpacking through Europe was being able to buy cheddar cheese in supermarkets again — it was non-existent in all the European shops I’d visited, and we usually settled for Edam or Gouda
Edit: I reread my comment and I realised it sounded super passive aggressive and that wasn’t at all my intention. My sample size of European countries is 5, which is far from representative for Europe, let alone the world
It’s used in hamburgers all over the world basically and you can purchase it in most supermarkets. In my experience, at least.
I’ve seen it in at least Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Argentina and Brazil. It’s also always labeled “cheddar” instead of “american”.
That ain’t cheddar. It’s American.
As I already said, “american” cheese is called cheddar pretty much everywhere.
I’ve had cheddar, and I’ve had American. These are two very different things. If I ask for cheddar, and you give me American, I’m going to be very unhappy.
The American Cheese with Pizza
that tweet reply is just 👄🤌
It’s ok. Our fellow Americans just don’t understand the meaning of the word pizza.
– yurobro
There are appropriate uses of government cheese product. This is absolutely not one of them.
Lol I can’t believe this is real. How terrible must food be in your city for this to be successful? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altoona-style_pizza
The most successful businesses in Altoona when I lived there in the early 2010s were drug rehabilitation centers. All the factories closed, and the town is slowly dying.
While originally topped with Velveeta, Altoona-style pizza is popularly topped with yellow processed cheese known as American cheese. The yellow squares of American cheese are a staple of this dish, used instead of the mozzarella or provolone common to other styles of pizza.
Everything about that paragraph makes me feel ill.
I do find it comical that Americans call processed cheese “American”
It’s telling for sure.
This made me discover Velveeta. I wish I hadn’t.
Do not make the fudge recipe. Trust me.
I am sorry? There’s a Velveeta fudge recipe!
Just the thought it is alone 🤮
It’s from the 1980s iirc. I made it once which is one time more than it should have existed at all. It literally tastes like chocolatey barf.
That passage explains the what , but nothing can explain the why.
Lol, I do eat this type of cheese with grilled cheese… But this application is disgusting.
Following the destruction of the hotel in 2013 by fire, other local restaurants began serving Altoona-style pizza
It could have died there, but they had to do this
Mozzarella is nice though, just that it’s mentioned makes me feel a bit better. As if the world isn’t broken completely.
Fixed that for Wikipedia:
Fun fact, you can trigger Wikipedia editors by changing the page in developer console and posting a screenshot of it, they’ll scramble to revert a change that doesn’t exist.
Or just edit as usual, then click on preview and screenshot that. Also works on mobile!
American cheese on pizza? that’s the kind of thing I would do if I’m down to the last two items in the kitchen, and feel too lazy to go shopping, but still would hate it
That’s the type of thing you make if you have nothing else in the fridge and you can’t go out to get anything else. And you’d keep that shit quiet and never admit to it to anyone.
Like Kenji’s smash burgers, “held together with hope and American Cheese”
there’s no excuse for making a bad pizza. It’s pizza, it’s very hard to do it wrong
The only people who say this are people who have never had good pizza before.
The “iT’s PiZzA, sO iT’s GoOd” crowd drive me nuts. You would probably put ketchup and Velveeta on a Ritz cracker and call it a pizza. Have some standards, my dude.
I do have standards. It’s easy to make good pizza, you’d have to be an idiot with zero culinary skills to mess it up
Yeah like, just don’t call it a pizza and we’re good. Call it an “Altooner” or whatever, but don’t soil the good reputation of pizza with whatever this creation is.
Altoona melt
Misc toppings on bread dough with some kind of cheese is probably thousands of years old.
If memory serves right a round bread with toppings is semi important in the Aeneid. Which assuming it isnt based off of older traditions means its at least 2000 years old, though I dont know if Virgil was pulling from older shit so I cant say for certain. Also I dont know if cheese was in Italy by that point.
