At Diana's,
we only use 100% Canadian dairy cheeses on our pizzas, with the exception of
the *by request only* Daiya shred, a non-dairy, non-GMO, vegan friendly cheese
and the Buffalo Mozzarella which comes straight from Italy. That sounds pretty straight forward, right? Doesn't
every pizza ever made come with real dairy cheese? Nope, not in Canada, and it
hasn't been that way for a while. Let me
explain.
The other
day I got a flyer in the mail from one of the pizza chains, advertising a new
line of designer pizzas, with, of all things 100% REAL Canadian Mozzarella
cheese. Yes, it appears that they are
now offering to put REAL dairy mozzarella on their pizzas, but not for the
usual $5 a pizza price. They are
marketing this designer line of pizzas as ‘gourmet’ because they put REAL dairy
mozzarella on them, so they’re more expensive.
Yeah, it's impossible to make a pizza with real-food ingredients for the
low, low price they usually push their pizzas at.
This is no
surprise to me, as a master pizza chef I've been educating people for years. The facts are that pizza chains are not using
real 100% dairy mozzarella. Most use
either soy or canola based cheeses.
Yeah, you read that right, cheese made from oil, not dairy. The
worst offenders use a cheese made from a petroleum based oil. So the same stuff we put in our cars is what many
non-food ingredient cheeses are made from.
But don't worry, this is a food grade version of petroleum, so you know,
it's like the petroleum jelly they sell that you can use on skin. Except I don't know anybody who uses that on
their skin. Mmmm, can I get extra
petroleum jelly cheese on that pizza? Yeah?! I don't know about you, but I
don't want to eat that. Even if it looks
like something I usually really like, like pizza. Eating that kind of stuff gives me a really
bad non-food ingredient hangover. And I
know I'm not the only one.
There is a lot of pressure in today's society to get 'the
best deal' and 'the lowest price', for goods and services to the extreme that
many feel that if they don't get the lowest price then it means they have been
taken advantage of. And who wants to
feel that way? While there may be little or no difference between some goods
and services I must be a beacon of reason when it comes to pizza. Not all pizzas are created equal.
At Diana's, we only
use 100% Canadian dairy cheeses on our pizzas, with the exception of the *by
request only* Daiya shred, a non-dairy, non-GMO, vegan friendly cheese and the
Buffalo Mozzarella which comes straight from Italy. That sounds pretty straight forward, right?
Yeah, that's how we do.