I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the final product, besides the feeling of tradition.
Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine, replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.
The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession.
Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change?
I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.
The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people are working with streetlights now.
The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though. The person that can raise a burning stick to a kerosene lamp has to have a different skill set than the person fixing lamps in public spaces. I'm assuming you don't mean "screwing in a light bulb" type work, which would be close enough in skill requirements, that the person whose profession was destroyed could reasonably do the new profession without a lot of learning being required.
In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.
Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.
Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.
Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.
"The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though"
It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.
Even if someone can transfer from lamp lighter to street light technician people will have lost their jobs, because you no longer need enough people to make sure all the lamps get lit within a reasonable space of time, you just need maybe a dozen people covering maintenance and repairs on a city full of streetlights.
The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade.
some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form.
“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."
Our culture tends to embrace technological progress. But we don't have to. It's just something we do accept. And yes, many technologies have eliminated jobs. Some have created new ones sure, but it's not always 1 to 1. Not everyone replaced on an assembly line by a robot or machine, is needed to repair or build that new machine.
Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.
Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.
An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.
That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently.
Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers.
The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese.
On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium version
Edit: I can point to cases of that happening
Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
Happens to musical instrument manufacturers all the time, too. I used to have a Chickering piano from around 1915; a lovely instrument with a good reputation. At some point that company was sold, and they continued to produce pianos under that name, but they were nothing like the original.
>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.
lmao, they don't stand a chance. We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department to test if local producers aren't secretly mixing their extra virgin oil with chemically treated oil from last year. Nobody food snobs like the Italians (and I love them for it).
In the US, the best example is in California. To get the California Olive Oil Council stamp of extra virgin quality, you must have your oil tasted by the government body. I'm one of such tasters :)
This is why I mostly buy Californian olive oil now. I like the legit italian or spanish kind more, but it's faked so often in the grocery store that it isn't even worth attempting to decide if it's real. Sometimes the fakes tell you it's cut with olives from africa, and sometimes they don't. The US importers are held to no standards whatsoever. At least when I buy california olive oil, it's 95% of the way there and guaranteed to be real.
Seems to me as they are Italian oil testers, identifying non-Italian oil as a problem makes sense, because from their perspective it doesn't meet the standards they are paid to uphold.
Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor.
It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in.
Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.
You seem to be taking a reasonable approach, I have a Gaggia bean to cup machine and try lots of different beans and always try to get seasonal.
I pretty much drink solely espresso, but will sometimes have cappuccino for breakfast (which is the only time of day that Italy accepts!)
Ultimately, it’s about what you like. It doesn’t really matter what Italy thinks. But as with anything, getting good ingredients and preparing them well makes a difference.
I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘coffee snob’, more a coffee enthusiast :D. Good coffee from ethical sources is just better. People talk of coffee jitters. I don’t get any. And the variety of flavours is awesome.
btw, anyone in the UK: I really like Coffee Bean Shop [1]. It’s a small family owned coffee roaster, with a good variety of flavours. And on every delivery there’s a hand written note from the packer. Usually talking about the weather, but can be a variety of things. It’s very cute in our internet age and genuinely brings a smile to my face every time I open the package. The coffees are excellent too.
What’s wrong with the Moka pot?
I travel a lot so I always bring mine with me. I find using the right coffee and slowly heating the water produces pretty good coffee.
AFAIK the battitori are employed directly from the Consorzio, the trade association which owns the brand.
So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".
If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’.
The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots.
> there are plenty of other watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots
In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..."
Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
> A study on structural quality control of Swiss‐type cheese with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode pulse‐echo setup using 1–2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to detect cheese‐eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored with ultrasonic velocity measurements.
Note that this is already industry-standard for non-destructive testing of metal, concrete and composites. Handheld ultrasonic tomography devices are commercially available and could plausibly be used on cheese with only minor modification.
Other commenters have given what's probably the right answer, but in the spirit of exploration, I wonder about electrical impedance tomography. I'd think a salty cheese would be a pretty good medium to pass electricity through, and since the wheels are very uniform in shape, you could make a chuck that held electrodes in contact with the wheel. We don't really need precise information about the shape and location of the voids, we're not going to do surgery on the cheese, so the coarseness of EIT might not be an issue.
Just doing the same thing they do, basically. Have a tiny transducer "hit" the cheese and listen for echo back.
Now, I don't think ultrasound would work (it's a harder cheese than Swiss cheese), also the mechanical interface would be a complication (you can't gel the cheese). CT would work but be expensive
But tiny percussions and analysis of echo/transmission delays would work in principle
Industrial CT would probably be pretty effective at giving a density distribution and identifying voids, but that may be overkill - a couple planes of X-ray imaging may be sufficient.
Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
(Admittedly without knowing much about it) I'll throw Ground Penetrating Radar onto this armchair metaphorical ideas whiteboard. The industrial CT scanner idea uses x-rays, while GPR is more in the UHF/VHF frequencies which probably means cheaper/easier? The tech seems to have some tunability for the specific application:
> Thus operating frequency is always a trade-off between resolution and penetration. Optimal depth of subsurface penetration is achieved in ice where the depth of penetration can achieve several thousand metres (to bedrock in Greenland) at low GPR frequencies. Dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete tend to be resistive rather than conductive, and the depth of penetration could be up to 15 metres (49 ft). However, in moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few centimetres.
It feels simplistic, but if the primary problem is fissures and pockets forming, I'd assume they would be full of air. If you know the volume of the wheel and the density per pound, you could weigh it on a very precise scale
It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans are multimodal, machines are not, yet.
The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For now, we have better results with humans!
Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.
I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product.
Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.
It can be an art, and I for one am very glad I'm surrounded by countries where it is considered as such (e.g. Italy, France) so that I can indulge in tasty experiences almost everyday rather than treating "getting fed" as a 7h-per-week chore. That would suck.
as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta.
Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little chewy chunks.
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own.
I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) / dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
The Co-op food stores in Hanover and Lebanon NH did a March madness cheese bracket. We hosted a small bracket party with a selection of unfamiliar cheeses for friends to try while filling out our brackets.
It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly refined thing). It was all delicious though!
From what I read [1] this habit of eating cheese as part of the meal is a tradition in France since at least the Middle Age, although until the end of the XIXth century it was eaten after the dessert instead of before. However I can’t find why this happens in France and not in other cheese-loving countries like Switzerland or Italy.
But it doesn't need to be! If you want to put out a nice charcuterie and cheese spread for a social occasion, you have so many options at multiple price points. You can make a great spread with even a generic cheddar, colby, "mozerella" etc. If you've got a restaurant supply store near you, bet you can find some basic sausages, salami, etc that won't break the ban on a charcuterie board. I've seen $20 spreads and $200+ spreads, and while they were different, each made the guests happy.
> (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
that's sad. i love at home charcuterie boards and a nice bottle of wine. while much more fancy that what my dad did. I did grew up with blocks of cheese pretty much always available as he loved cheese. and no, we're not from Wisconsin
This is such an underrated experience - a bottle of wine (doesn't even have to be particularly expensive, just pleasant), some cheeses, maybe a few slices of sausage or cold cuts, maybe a baguette or a salty cracker. Jazz or perhaps a some easy listening music in the background - pure bliss! The best things in life cost so little and yet are so perfect.
Cheese as a standalone course was a thing in Italy too, after the other courses, and it disappeared in recent decades.
You can see remnants in pop culture, e.g. in the '80s we had a tv quiz show called "il pranzo è servito" ("lunch is served") where participants had to win rounds for each of: first course, second course, cheese, dessert, fruit.
There was also a saying in central Italy "la bocca non è stracca se non sa di vacca" ("the mouth is not tired unless it tastes of cow", which in hindsight is odd cause there's mostly sheep cheese there) but by the '90s the cheese plate had switched to antipasti only, IME.
I do eat cheese with my Italian family as main course, usually when coming back from the Alps with a good amount of homemade cheese. The best with potatoes.
For those who don't know, the rind can also be just plain eaten. Maybe I'm just a heathen, but I find it far too delicious to ever waste on a pot of soup.
I got home today from my first trip to Italy (we went to Verona for Vin Italy) and cheese was at the top of my shopping list of things to bring back. As it happens, I’m right now eating some 36 month aged Parmigiano Reggiano; absolutely beautiful. The food and wine I enjoyed in your country were on another level! On the subject of risotto, I had my first ever(!) risotto last night: a risotto amarone, and wow! Absolutely incredible, molto interessante!
For just raw cheese taste, me and my whole family both older and younger (which grew up in eastern europe where absolutely none of these was known behind iron curtain, not even as cheap stolen bad copies), AOC Gruyère surchoix and aged Gouda are top.
From italian its pecorino pepato (specifc, I know) and then black truffles variants, usually also of pecorino.
Maybe cheese you mention are more of an acquired taste rather than love at first sight, can't tell but will keep trying :)
I agree, they're so good on their own for snacking, a really good Reggiano has such an interesting flavor, I can't get enough. Runners-up for me include gruyere, a dark aged gouda, or camembert or reblochon. I just had a piece of locally-produced but nothing compares to Reggiano.
I tried Grana Padano once and my take away was that I would never choose that cheese over Parmigiano Reggiano. Isn't it just an inferior similar cheese?
Parmigiano Reggiano is more tightly controlled, and has larger total cheese produced (by a fair bit I think).
Very good Grana Padano can be just as good, but there are lots of bulk producers who turn out younger, cheaper cheese, that is yummy, but not as good as aged Parmigiano Reggiano.
FWIW, in the USA in particular, there is quite an industry in fake Parmigiano Reggiano.
I love them as well, but they seem to be too hard and too strong to pair well with bread. They really do seem to work best grated into things like pasta, risotto, and soup, or as shavings in salad.
I mean, you do you, but you'd find me reaching for a lot of other cheeses first to go with my bread.
I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it.
Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously.
The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was fully automated with no human involvement at all!
As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things.
A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better.
On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives.
The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese.
With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.
This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats.
It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product.
many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at identifying patterns and returning if something does, or doesn't, fit the pattern.
Try to generate something new based on that pattern, and they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass/fail reply? They're amazing at that.
Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
This reminded me of the story about Charles Proteus Steinmetz diagnosing the problem inside a generator at Henry Ford's auto plant just by listening to it very carefully.
"Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz ... responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
How much is the legal obligation to pay such a bill, legally speaking? It sounds like they hadn't agreed on a figure beforehand, so could he have billed an arbitrary amount (say, a million dollars) and would Ford have been required to pay that too? What is the limit?
What is an appropriate fee to charge any particular customer when what you’re billing for isn’t necessarily time and materials, but more so the skill / experience required to diagnose and rectify an issue, or otherwise provide a solution, in a timely manner?
I’d argue the most correct answer is: up to the customers ability to tolerate, such that they’d be inclined to want to become repeat customers.
The legal standard will be related. Absent a written deal, the court would look at what the customer would have or should have reasonably expected, based on typical rates for such work, the value and cost of doing the work, etc. It can get quite messy and usually it's not worthwhile litigating such a thing.
(heck, even with a written deal, the fine print often matters less that people might think in court, though a badly written contract will sure draw out much more protracted arguments about such details)
I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.
They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.
The modern equivalent of this would be a one-line change in a codebase that fixes a significant issue. If you then log three days of effort on the ticket, people may also start questioning that, but:
Changing a line: 1 minute
Knowing which line to change (which includes making sure that the change doesn't break something else): 23 hours, 59 minutes
Interesting! I was reminded of the skills of older physicians, who could make an informed diagnosis going just on the symptoms and maybe using a stethoscope, whereas younger ones immediately order a full blood test and maybe throw in an MRI just to be sure.
Just like people sometimes question the human element in judging sports, I wonder if there are cheesemakers who think these guys are simply against them or favorable to their neighbors.
One thing I've also wondered about this process. When I buy Parmigiano Reggiano, it's just sold as "Parmigiano Reggiano". There's no discernable branding beyond that (compared to the Pecorino Romano I buy, which has "Locatelli" plastered all over it). Is this true all over? Do any HNers seek out Parmigiano Reggiano from their favorite dairy?
If you buy it vacuum-sealed from a shop, the packaging usually has additional branding from the producer.
Not a "favorite dairy", but if it's convenient to do so, I usually look for the "vacche rosse" type, which is more expensive but also noticeably different (and better). Of course it would be a waste to grate it over pasta; better to eat it on its own.
Curious about this quote: "'My elder colleagues tell me you never stop learning, even after 50 years of doing it,' recounted Stocchi. 'The day you think you’ve learned everything is the day you’ll start making errors.'" - To me this implies that there is more variation among the cheese than I'd expect. In this role don't you see every likely cheese over 50 years? It seems like a static product, where production methods don't change, and that should give you very consistent results from tapping.
Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the variation in the process but its core input is still very much alive and organic so there’s only so much they can control it.
It's interesting to me that, from what they describe, they still sell the cheese regardless of the outcome of this tapping test. It's just that they sell it unbranded if it's of the lowest quality, and with a different marking for medium quality than highest-quality.
I suppose wheels of cheese can last a lot longer than normal table cheese, so that's why it makes sense to make this distinction.
I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal story.
From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did.
The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a better sniff test.
Almost sounds like it’s related to some fermented product, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was indeed cheese. I don’t think scent is great for much besides checking current state.
There's just something incredible about a skill that exists entirely in someone's ears and hands, passed down person-to-person, not taught in a classroom, not automated, not optimized - just learned over time standing next to someone wiser than you
I wonder whether the cheese would ripen better and get better structure, less defects/voids, if it were subjected to the sound vibrations from Italian opera singing records playing during those months of ripening.
They make it sound really complicated, requiring years of mentorship, but really, it was just determining if the sound is the same on multiple taps. It would seem pretty obvious if you tap over a hollow.
There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"
How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.
My 100% favourite part of this write up is the mention of "piano piano".
In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta, living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good" to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano piano...".
I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it slowly".
Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me when I was working on the house.
"Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".
TLDR: The Italian way of doing acoustic, non-destructive testing of a material. This is also done in many other things such as pipelines, chairlifts, and welded metals or machines that have pre-recorded acoustic signatures or sound recordings. Hit it with a hammer, listen to the tone. If it sounds very different, inspect or reject.
The website makes me think they want lots of money. It's as if they are saying leave the cheese to the experts. As a hacker I wonder how much of that is true.
It's been possible to automate this job away for decades, with no AI necessary. You could image these cheese wheels with ultrasound or X-rays and establish thresholds for the size of voids which are tolerable. This must be a concern wherever parts are cast, so surely there are off the shelf solutions. Presumably this isn't news to the relevant parties and they value having human battitores over the savings.
The 'savings' could also take an unreasonably long time to realize. The capital outlay is not small (the scanning machines, their maintenance, still need humans to categorize the cheeses) and artisanal cheese probably isn't all that high-volume a business nor is it particularly bound by precision and tight tolerances - it can matter a lot that some doodad that goes into a machine is defect free, less so with a hunk of cheese.
ML algorithm probably could do parts of the job. The tap and sound.
But there is most likely also large amount general QA of environment going on. Are things done right, is temperature right, is humidity right, is there weird touch. And so on.
All of this is much harder to understand and gather under scope of AI... Lot of it is likely not even conscious...
I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the final product, besides the feeling of tradition.
Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine, replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.
The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession.
It sucks.
Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change?
I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.
The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people are working with streetlights now.
I might not see people lighting kerosene lamps but I see people climb big ladders to fix lamps that light up public spaces.
I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.
The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though. The person that can raise a burning stick to a kerosene lamp has to have a different skill set than the person fixing lamps in public spaces. I'm assuming you don't mean "screwing in a light bulb" type work, which would be close enough in skill requirements, that the person whose profession was destroyed could reasonably do the new profession without a lot of learning being required.
In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.
Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.
Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.
Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.
"The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though"
It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.
Even if someone can transfer from lamp lighter to street light technician people will have lost their jobs, because you no longer need enough people to make sure all the lamps get lit within a reasonable space of time, you just need maybe a dozen people covering maintenance and repairs on a city full of streetlights.
OTOH, no one likes "American Flavored Imitation Pasteurized Process Cheese Food".
The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade.
some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form.
“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
This is probably my favorite comment ever. Bravo!
And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."
Knocker-up? I hardly know 'er!
People get paid to do this? I’m not doubting the veracity, I’m just surprised.
Our culture tends to embrace technological progress. But we don't have to. It's just something we do accept. And yes, many technologies have eliminated jobs. Some have created new ones sure, but it's not always 1 to 1. Not everyone replaced on an assembly line by a robot or machine, is needed to repair or build that new machine.
Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.
Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.
An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.
That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently.
Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese.
It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.
I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers.
The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese.
On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium version
Edit: I can point to cases of that happening
Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
Happens to musical instrument manufacturers all the time, too. I used to have a Chickering piano from around 1915; a lovely instrument with a good reputation. At some point that company was sold, and they continued to produce pianos under that name, but they were nothing like the original.
Tradition isn't just nostalgia - sometimes it's a protective layer against that slippery slope toward mediocrity disguised as efficiency
>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.
lmao, they don't stand a chance. We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department to test if local producers aren't secretly mixing their extra virgin oil with chemically treated oil from last year. Nobody food snobs like the Italians (and I love them for it).
> We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department
The US government operates several special tasting departments.
Probably not anymore
In the US, the best example is in California. To get the California Olive Oil Council stamp of extra virgin quality, you must have your oil tasted by the government body. I'm one of such tasters :)
This is why I mostly buy Californian olive oil now. I like the legit italian or spanish kind more, but it's faked so often in the grocery store that it isn't even worth attempting to decide if it's real. Sometimes the fakes tell you it's cut with olives from africa, and sometimes they don't. The US importers are held to no standards whatsoever. At least when I buy california olive oil, it's 95% of the way there and guaranteed to be real.
ok, then I'll link this video again to make sure you don't miss it because I bet it's extra entertaining for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s
Do the US tasting departments disqualify olive oil for daring to be (gasp!) Spanish in origin though?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkO1dwx2_KA&t=16m00s
Seems to me as they are Italian oil testers, identifying non-Italian oil as a problem makes sense, because from their perspective it doesn't meet the standards they are paid to uphold.
As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.
Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor.
It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
Bitterness seems to be common in Mediterranean cuisine in general.
What do you do now?
I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in.
Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.
You seem to be taking a reasonable approach, I have a Gaggia bean to cup machine and try lots of different beans and always try to get seasonal.
I pretty much drink solely espresso, but will sometimes have cappuccino for breakfast (which is the only time of day that Italy accepts!)
Ultimately, it’s about what you like. It doesn’t really matter what Italy thinks. But as with anything, getting good ingredients and preparing them well makes a difference.
I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘coffee snob’, more a coffee enthusiast :D. Good coffee from ethical sources is just better. People talk of coffee jitters. I don’t get any. And the variety of flavours is awesome.
btw, anyone in the UK: I really like Coffee Bean Shop [1]. It’s a small family owned coffee roaster, with a good variety of flavours. And on every delivery there’s a hand written note from the packer. Usually talking about the weather, but can be a variety of things. It’s very cute in our internet age and genuinely brings a smile to my face every time I open the package. The coffees are excellent too.
[1] https://coffeebeanshop.co.uk/
What’s wrong with the Moka pot? I travel a lot so I always bring mine with me. I find using the right coffee and slowly heating the water produces pretty good coffee.
Wait until you realise that coffee can also not be toasted dark to death. Then you get to explore the other tastes of coffee too!
It's on a different level.
based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?
AFAIK the battitori are employed directly from the Consorzio, the trade association which owns the brand.
So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".
Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll automate art and science and creativity so you have more time to do low-value manufacturing".
It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.
Indeed. I'd imagine most of the value of such automation would come from supposedly better quality control, not from saving money on salaries.
If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’.
The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots.
Same principle, I think.
> there are plenty of other watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots
In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
Indeed!
I embrace life’s imperfections :D
- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..."
Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
Ultrasound seems to be viable
> A study on structural quality control of Swiss‐type cheese with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode pulse‐echo setup using 1–2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to detect cheese‐eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored with ultrasonic velocity measurements.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953...
Note that this is already industry-standard for non-destructive testing of metal, concrete and composites. Handheld ultrasonic tomography devices are commercially available and could plausibly be used on cheese with only minor modification.
https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-e...
Other commenters have given what's probably the right answer, but in the spirit of exploration, I wonder about electrical impedance tomography. I'd think a salty cheese would be a pretty good medium to pass electricity through, and since the wheels are very uniform in shape, you could make a chuck that held electrodes in contact with the wheel. We don't really need precise information about the shape and location of the voids, we're not going to do surgery on the cheese, so the coarseness of EIT might not be an issue.
Just doing the same thing they do, basically. Have a tiny transducer "hit" the cheese and listen for echo back.
Now, I don't think ultrasound would work (it's a harder cheese than Swiss cheese), also the mechanical interface would be a complication (you can't gel the cheese). CT would work but be expensive
But tiny percussions and analysis of echo/transmission delays would work in principle
Industrial CT would probably be pretty effective at giving a density distribution and identifying voids, but that may be overkill - a couple planes of X-ray imaging may be sufficient.
Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
Microphones and spectral analysis. Or the same equipment used for flaw detection of welds with ultrasound.
(Admittedly without knowing much about it) I'll throw Ground Penetrating Radar onto this armchair metaphorical ideas whiteboard. The industrial CT scanner idea uses x-rays, while GPR is more in the UHF/VHF frequencies which probably means cheaper/easier? The tech seems to have some tunability for the specific application:
> Thus operating frequency is always a trade-off between resolution and penetration. Optimal depth of subsurface penetration is achieved in ice where the depth of penetration can achieve several thousand metres (to bedrock in Greenland) at low GPR frequencies. Dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete tend to be resistive rather than conductive, and the depth of penetration could be up to 15 metres (49 ft). However, in moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few centimetres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar
A sonogram… it doesn’t even need to be AI
It feels simplistic, but if the primary problem is fissures and pockets forming, I'd assume they would be full of air. If you know the volume of the wheel and the density per pound, you could weigh it on a very precise scale
It wouldn't. Not for now
It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans are multimodal, machines are not, yet.
The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For now, we have better results with humans!
Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
Preparing a Michelin star worthy meal is orders of magnitude harder than checking a cheese for defects.
It requires the same basic modality
replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.
I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product.
Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.
> Food is an art.
While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art. It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for survival.
It can be an art, and I for one am very glad I'm surrounded by countries where it is considered as such (e.g. Italy, France) so that I can indulge in tasty experiences almost everyday rather than treating "getting fed" as a 7h-per-week chore. That would suck.
as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta.
Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little chewy chunks.
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own.
I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) / dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
Why do you think this happens?
In America eating cheese by itself is usually seen as a very fancy activity.
I can’t think of the last time I had a spread of just cheese in the US, and it was probably a fancy place.
The Co-op food stores in Hanover and Lebanon NH did a March madness cheese bracket. We hosted a small bracket party with a selection of unfamiliar cheeses for friends to try while filling out our brackets.
It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly refined thing). It was all delicious though!
From what I read [1] this habit of eating cheese as part of the meal is a tradition in France since at least the Middle Age, although until the end of the XIXth century it was eaten after the dessert instead of before. However I can’t find why this happens in France and not in other cheese-loving countries like Switzerland or Italy.
[1]: https://ericbirlouez.fr/index.php/activites/articles/42-une-... (fr)
But it doesn't need to be! If you want to put out a nice charcuterie and cheese spread for a social occasion, you have so many options at multiple price points. You can make a great spread with even a generic cheddar, colby, "mozerella" etc. If you've got a restaurant supply store near you, bet you can find some basic sausages, salami, etc that won't break the ban on a charcuterie board. I've seen $20 spreads and $200+ spreads, and while they were different, each made the guests happy.
No, the American style of eating cheese by itself is anything but a fancy activity.
We usually lean over the sink, with the bag of shredded in one hand…
> (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
that's sad. i love at home charcuterie boards and a nice bottle of wine. while much more fancy that what my dad did. I did grew up with blocks of cheese pretty much always available as he loved cheese. and no, we're not from Wisconsin
This is such an underrated experience - a bottle of wine (doesn't even have to be particularly expensive, just pleasant), some cheeses, maybe a few slices of sausage or cold cuts, maybe a baguette or a salty cracker. Jazz or perhaps a some easy listening music in the background - pure bliss! The best things in life cost so little and yet are so perfect.
Cheese as a standalone course was a thing in Italy too, after the other courses, and it disappeared in recent decades.
You can see remnants in pop culture, e.g. in the '80s we had a tv quiz show called "il pranzo è servito" ("lunch is served") where participants had to win rounds for each of: first course, second course, cheese, dessert, fruit.
There was also a saying in central Italy "la bocca non è stracca se non sa di vacca" ("the mouth is not tired unless it tastes of cow", which in hindsight is odd cause there's mostly sheep cheese there) but by the '90s the cheese plate had switched to antipasti only, IME.
I do eat cheese with my Italian family as main course, usually when coming back from the Alps with a good amount of homemade cheese. The best with potatoes.
Also Italian, lots of really interesting cheeses out there.
Appenzeller medium, young Asiago, sake trappist cheese, blue brie, extra sharp English cheddar, and of course mozzarella and halloumi.
I think both the Grana and the Parmiggiano are great in some places but not everywhere, so I couldn't pick them as sole winners.
For those who didn't know, the rind can also be dropped into an otherwise ordinary pot of soup and add a lot of flavor.
Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing look to my eye.
What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?
For those who don't know, the rind can also be just plain eaten. Maybe I'm just a heathen, but I find it far too delicious to ever waste on a pot of soup.
I used to just microwave it or bake it, wonderful snack.
I got home today from my first trip to Italy (we went to Verona for Vin Italy) and cheese was at the top of my shopping list of things to bring back. As it happens, I’m right now eating some 36 month aged Parmigiano Reggiano; absolutely beautiful. The food and wine I enjoyed in your country were on another level! On the subject of risotto, I had my first ever(!) risotto last night: a risotto amarone, and wow! Absolutely incredible, molto interessante!
Sounds like you did Italy right. Now good luck going back to regular supermarket cheese without shedding a small tear.
For just raw cheese taste, me and my whole family both older and younger (which grew up in eastern europe where absolutely none of these was known behind iron curtain, not even as cheap stolen bad copies), AOC Gruyère surchoix and aged Gouda are top.
From italian its pecorino pepato (specifc, I know) and then black truffles variants, usually also of pecorino.
Maybe cheese you mention are more of an acquired taste rather than love at first sight, can't tell but will keep trying :)
I agree, they're so good on their own for snacking, a really good Reggiano has such an interesting flavor, I can't get enough. Runners-up for me include gruyere, a dark aged gouda, or camembert or reblochon. I just had a piece of locally-produced but nothing compares to Reggiano.
Also I always add the rind to my risotto too!
I tried Grana Padano once and my take away was that I would never choose that cheese over Parmigiano Reggiano. Isn't it just an inferior similar cheese?
Not necessarily, but yes on average.
Parmigiano Reggiano is more tightly controlled, and has larger total cheese produced (by a fair bit I think).
Very good Grana Padano can be just as good, but there are lots of bulk producers who turn out younger, cheaper cheese, that is yummy, but not as good as aged Parmigiano Reggiano.
FWIW, in the USA in particular, there is quite an industry in fake Parmigiano Reggiano.
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-08-25/c...
I take some when I go hiking for a few days, they can handle spending a few days in a backpack and have a good calories / weight ratio.
I didn't grow up with it like you did, but the first time I tried a chunk of it on its own with a little honey and bread… game over.
There are variants (without the trademarked? names) - 'Uguale', is a nice cheese, without the geo-protected price tag.
I absolutely love them. I don't like how it melts on pasta, so I eat it directly.
I love them as well, but they seem to be too hard and too strong to pair well with bread. They really do seem to work best grated into things like pasta, risotto, and soup, or as shavings in salad.
I mean, you do you, but you'd find me reaching for a lot of other cheeses first to go with my bread.
Um… but pecorino romano exists…
Exactly! They're the best until you try pecorino romano. Unless it's strictly a matter of taste, but IMHO a lot better than parmigiano reggiano
I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it.
Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously.
The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was fully automated with no human involvement at all!
As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things.
A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better.
On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives.
The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese.
With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.
This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats.
It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.
With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator though.
Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other than the human lawn mowers.
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product.
many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as yours.
As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at identifying patterns and returning if something does, or doesn't, fit the pattern.
Try to generate something new based on that pattern, and they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass/fail reply? They're amazing at that.
Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
This reminded me of the story about Charles Proteus Steinmetz diagnosing the problem inside a generator at Henry Ford's auto plant just by listening to it very carefully.
"Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz ... responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
Why repeat a common joke as if it were a historical event?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
Funny how both cheese tapping and generator listening come down to the same core skill: quiet mastery built from experience, not textbooks
How much is the legal obligation to pay such a bill, legally speaking? It sounds like they hadn't agreed on a figure beforehand, so could he have billed an arbitrary amount (say, a million dollars) and would Ford have been required to pay that too? What is the limit?
What is an appropriate fee to charge any particular customer when what you’re billing for isn’t necessarily time and materials, but more so the skill / experience required to diagnose and rectify an issue, or otherwise provide a solution, in a timely manner?
I’d argue the most correct answer is: up to the customers ability to tolerate, such that they’d be inclined to want to become repeat customers.
I'm not asking what's appropriate. I'm asking what is legally obligated.
The legal standard will be related. Absent a written deal, the court would look at what the customer would have or should have reasonably expected, based on typical rates for such work, the value and cost of doing the work, etc. It can get quite messy and usually it's not worthwhile litigating such a thing.
(heck, even with a written deal, the fine print often matters less that people might think in court, though a badly written contract will sure draw out much more protracted arguments about such details)
Depends on the contract the parties agreed on.
I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.
They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.
The modern equivalent of this would be a one-line change in a codebase that fixes a significant issue. If you then log three days of effort on the ticket, people may also start questioning that, but:
Changing a line: 1 minute
Knowing which line to change (which includes making sure that the change doesn't break something else): 23 hours, 59 minutes
Interesting! I was reminded of the skills of older physicians, who could make an informed diagnosis going just on the symptoms and maybe using a stethoscope, whereas younger ones immediately order a full blood test and maybe throw in an MRI just to be sure.
If you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Zg3nAtyDc
Thanks. I almost missed this because I searched the comment page for “video” so I’m mentioning video here so others can find it. :)
Just like people sometimes question the human element in judging sports, I wonder if there are cheesemakers who think these guys are simply against them or favorable to their neighbors.
One thing I've also wondered about this process. When I buy Parmigiano Reggiano, it's just sold as "Parmigiano Reggiano". There's no discernable branding beyond that (compared to the Pecorino Romano I buy, which has "Locatelli" plastered all over it). Is this true all over? Do any HNers seek out Parmigiano Reggiano from their favorite dairy?
From what I understand, all parmigiano is sold through a consortium/coop. The only dairy identifying mark is three digits stencilled onto the rind.
https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/product-guide-seals-and-m...
If you buy it vacuum-sealed from a shop, the packaging usually has additional branding from the producer.
Not a "favorite dairy", but if it's convenient to do so, I usually look for the "vacche rosse" type, which is more expensive but also noticeably different (and better). Of course it would be a waste to grate it over pasta; better to eat it on its own.
Vacche rosse 24 months and a glass of red wine, you just made me salivate.
The 36 months is too strong in my opinion, still delicious but I like the 24 more.
Curious about this quote: "'My elder colleagues tell me you never stop learning, even after 50 years of doing it,' recounted Stocchi. 'The day you think you’ve learned everything is the day you’ll start making errors.'" - To me this implies that there is more variation among the cheese than I'd expect. In this role don't you see every likely cheese over 50 years? It seems like a static product, where production methods don't change, and that should give you very consistent results from tapping.
Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the variation in the process but its core input is still very much alive and organic so there’s only so much they can control it.
It's interesting to me that, from what they describe, they still sell the cheese regardless of the outcome of this tapping test. It's just that they sell it unbranded if it's of the lowest quality, and with a different marking for medium quality than highest-quality.
I suppose wheels of cheese can last a lot longer than normal table cheese, so that's why it makes sense to make this distinction.
Cheese, not the kind that comes in plastic bags, is incredibly cool and delicious. It is nothing like what most people think of as cheese.
There are some youtube videos about people making artisanal cheeses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM102CO8JL0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpROVueIcE
Kids! Do this at home!!! I've been making cheese at home for the last year. It is hard - but not as hard as programming and tastes much, much, better.
What do you do with the whey? I make paneer at home and use the whey to make chapati (bread).
I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal story.
From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did.
The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a better sniff test.
Almost sounds like it’s related to some fermented product, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was indeed cheese. I don’t think scent is great for much besides checking current state.
There's just something incredible about a skill that exists entirely in someone's ears and hands, passed down person-to-person, not taught in a classroom, not automated, not optimized - just learned over time standing next to someone wiser than you
I wonder whether the cheese would ripen better and get better structure, less defects/voids, if it were subjected to the sound vibrations from Italian opera singing records playing during those months of ripening.
They make it sound really complicated, requiring years of mentorship, but really, it was just determining if the sound is the same on multiple taps. It would seem pretty obvious if you tap over a hollow.
Wait, you just hit keys on a keyboard all day and see if it works??
Your job looks really easy to an outsider too, regardless of what you do
Seriously, how complicated can a job be that involves only a little hammer and wheels of cheese. Like, come on.
There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet
Contaminants are a common problem in industrial food manufacturing: citric acid (fungal contaminants), vitamin C (heavy metals), and "enzymes" (?).
I'm glad Italians insist their cheeses be made following the traditional methods.
> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"
How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.
> How can you be so certain?
"Vibe diagnosing"
Vibagnosis
Maybe it was an allergic reaction to the mold inhibitor? Vegetarian rennet and animal rennet are both chymosin.
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I'm curious about the False Positive/False Negative rate of the battitore. Do they open up some wheels to double check?
What a fascinating and unique craft! The skill of the battitori to detect defects in Parmigiano Reggiano with just a tap is truly remarkable.
The sharing of the article and comments: Why I love HN. Thank you.
My 100% favourite part of this write up is the mention of "piano piano".
In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta, living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good" to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano piano...".
I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it slowly".
Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me when I was working on the house.
"Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".
Why not!
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TLDR: The Italian way of doing acoustic, non-destructive testing of a material. This is also done in many other things such as pipelines, chairlifts, and welded metals or machines that have pre-recorded acoustic signatures or sound recordings. Hit it with a hammer, listen to the tone. If it sounds very different, inspect or reject.
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The website makes me think they want lots of money. It's as if they are saying leave the cheese to the experts. As a hacker I wonder how much of that is true.
This is like if Toyota were to announce that for each shipping car, they kick all the tires, slam the doors, and honk the horn.
It is probably just a joke for show and to fool naive competition.
Behind closed doors, they must do some actual quality tests.
Will an AI be able to do this too? Probably.
Hey! I don't think it's a good idea. But if it's cheap and effective, guess how long it will take?
It's been possible to automate this job away for decades, with no AI necessary. You could image these cheese wheels with ultrasound or X-rays and establish thresholds for the size of voids which are tolerable. This must be a concern wherever parts are cast, so surely there are off the shelf solutions. Presumably this isn't news to the relevant parties and they value having human battitores over the savings.
The 'savings' could also take an unreasonably long time to realize. The capital outlay is not small (the scanning machines, their maintenance, still need humans to categorize the cheeses) and artisanal cheese probably isn't all that high-volume a business nor is it particularly bound by precision and tight tolerances - it can matter a lot that some doodad that goes into a machine is defect free, less so with a hunk of cheese.
Not even an AI, there are simpler ways. But as an italian, I will be in the pitchforks-armed horrified mob if this will be proposed. Not a chance.
Presumably the mob would be armed with little hammers.
ML algorithm probably could do parts of the job. The tap and sound.
But there is most likely also large amount general QA of environment going on. Are things done right, is temperature right, is humidity right, is there weird touch. And so on.
All of this is much harder to understand and gather under scope of AI... Lot of it is likely not even conscious...
Technically? Not long. Socially and politically? My money’s on the battitore.