Living in the vast pizza desert that is New England, and with Detroit-style pizza being the trendy thing to make on youtube these days, we decided to try making it. According to every video (and there are many) on the topic, the key distinguishing features of this pizza are:
- Rectangle
- Special cheese
- Stripey sauce
Specifically on the cheese front, the "true" Detroit style uses what's called Brick cheese, only none of the youtubers can seem to describe it. According to them it melts like mozzerella but it has the "aged funk" of cheddar. Which, you all must be stealing each others' material because WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN.
Seriously what does that mean. I have never described a cheese as "funky" and if I did it would be the fake parmesan that comes in a tube and smells like feet.
Well, far be it from us to stray from the format so we ordered it, and obviously I gotta try this aged, funky cheese, and as soon as I did I felt immediately betrayed by the entire food youtube community because it's very obvious what this cheese is and how it's made.
It's cheese curds! It's fucking cheese curds, pressed into a block.
It tastes like a slightly old cheese curd, it has the exact same squeak as a slightly old cheese curd. Within seconds it was immediately clear that somebody at some point in the past had a bunch of extra cheese curds and mashed them all into a brick for storage. And presto! A new form of cheese was born.
For the record, cheese curds are dairy products found primarily in Wisconsin and Quebec, the latter of which uses them to make poutine, a very famous and also trendy dish these days. Because they don't travel well, they're hard to find outside those two centers, at least in my experience. Growing up a few hours north of the Wisconsin border, it was something we only picked up on the occasional road trip through the state.
If you have never eaten a cheese curd, I don't blame you. It's highly local and niche. But these are food youtubers I'm talking about. Literally your job is to go out and eat and cook things. And none of you have ever been to Wisconsin and had a butter burger and some fried cheese curds? Nobody's flown to Montreal and eaten poutine? You all had to use the same "aged funky" line which describes nothing? What the fuck are you guys doing?
Seriously.