And here I was thinking this was a Brazillian invention (they are wildly popular in Brazil, everywhere you go in Brazil, even the middle of nowhere, like Amazon Rainforest, you will find someone that owns one).
the most popular cheese, far ahead of anything else, is mozarella... it is not high quality as actual italian ones though (it is way less "fibrous").
then we have Prato (it means "Plate" as in dinner plate... or dinner dish...), that has the exact same recipe as Danbo, but is made with brazillian milk, and seemly tastes very differently (I dunno, since I never ate Danbo).
then we have a purely local invention called Minas, named after the state of Minas Gerais, despite being a São Paulo invention... (go figure...), that one is hard to describe, since it refers to 4 different cheeses (or the same cheese with 4 slightly variations in the process to make them, but with end results drastically different).
Then other italian cheeses are popular here, maybe because the large italian community here, and how much Brazillians also love pizza, so here almost every supermarket offers Provolone, Parmesan and Gorgonzola.
In urban areas you can find frequently "Steppe" cheese, it is a russian cheese it seems, it is expensive (double the price of "Prato") but not much as local clones of french/swiss cheese (Steppe is half of the price of local clones of Emmental, Gruyere, etc...)
cheddar cheese is sold a bit, but most people consider it low quality crap, the biggest seller of cheddar cheese don't even bother in selling actual cheddar, and instead sell a clone that tastes mostly the same, for very little... people still prefer to buy more expensive mozarella instead.
There's cheese which is made in America which for most intents and purposes is cheese like everywhere else, and then there's "American cheese" which comes in slices or blocks and is "cheese product" and only vaguely resembles the real thing despite being delicious in certain guilty-pleasure situations.
That makes no sense. The geographic source of the cheese is trivila compared to the way it is made. You can get cheap American process ccheese food or you can get expensive classic varieties of cheese from anywhere.
In my experience, the more popular american cheeses are quite mild and have a low melting temperature to get a good melt and stretch on warm food. I don't find them particularly interesting to just slice and put on a piece of bread. It is often easy enough to find good but expensive imported cheeses.
That’s exactly what I meant! We (my family being German) found it on one of our shopping trips at Bilka Kolding (we sometimes drive up there), and just bought one.
In Switzerland we do cheese shavings like described in the following article (although only for a specific type of cheese, the 'tete de moine' (monk's head). http://itotd.com/articles/217/the-girolle/
Huh. I've had a cheese slicer at home forever (Scottish-American).
It mostly gets used at dinner parties, when we buy nicer cheeses; inexpensive cheese is almost all pre-sliced in the US. Same holds true for my parents.
