Lol I can't believe this is real. How terrible must food be in your city for this to be successful? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altoona-style_pizza
While originally topped with Velveeta, Altoona-style pizza is popularly topped with yellow processed cheese known as American cheese. The yellow squares of American cheese are a staple of this dish, used instead of the mozzarella or provolone common to other styles of pizza.
Everything about that paragraph makes me feel ill.
Following the destruction of the hotel in 2013 by fire, other local restaurants began serving Altoona-style pizza
It could have died there, but they had to do this
This made me discover Velveeta. I wish I hadn't.
Do not make the fudge recipe. Trust me.
I am sorry? There's a Velveeta fudge recipe!
Just the thought it is alone 🤮
It's from the 1980s iirc. I made it once which is one time more than it should have existed at all. It literally tastes like chocolatey barf.
I do find it comical that Americans call processed cheese “American”
The most successful businesses in Altoona when I lived there in the early 2010s were drug rehabilitation centers. All the factories closed, and the town is slowly dying.
This is a fucking culinary crime.
American cheese on pizza? that's the kind of thing I would do if I'm down to the last two items in the kitchen, and feel too lazy to go shopping, but still would hate it
That's the type of thing you make if you have nothing else in the fridge and you can't go out to get anything else. And you'd keep that shit quiet and never admit to it to anyone.
cook with it? yeah
call it pizza? nope
I mean to be clear I'm from altoona and I've never seen pizza like this.
Y'all better be careful or you're going to fall down a rabithold of locally celebrated yet disgusting pizza in PA. It's like a whole thing there.
I knew PA was evil, but I never knew just how horrible.
I am biased being from NJ, but these pizzas vindicate me!
there's no excuse for making a bad pizza. It's pizza, it's very hard to do it wrong
Yeah like, just don't call it a pizza and we're good. Call it an "Altooner" or whatever, but don't soil the good reputation of pizza with whatever this creation is.
Altoona melt
I mean, sandwich bread, tomato sauce, ham and cheese on top, it's not a pizza, it's a microwaved 3am sandwich
Not cheese. Kraft fucking singles
Kraft singles are still cheese. They've just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.
That actually makes them super useful in making a cheese sauce.
Add a few slices to a queso and it will not break.
You fat. Smooth cheesey sauce that comes out perfect every time.
You can make sodium citrate with lemon juice and baking soda. Lime juice also works. Really any citric acid.
Anyway, you don't need much to make cheese melt smoothly.
We literally bought a can of sodium citrate to adulterate cheese at home.
Our nacho cheese is fucking amazing, and the cheese-milk ratio is absurd compared to what we used to be able to get. We can do 40% milk 60% cheddar and it still works. We stir in garlic, chili, cumin, salt and pepper, too.
Kraft singles are still cheese. They've just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.
No, if it was just cheese that's been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate it would be pasteurized process cheese. A couple other additional additives are acceptable.
When it has other additives but is at least half cheese by weight it's pasteurized process cheese food.
When it's pasteurized process cheese product it's not meeting any of those standards. Often because it's less than half cheese or an addictive outside the accepted list to meet the other definitions is being used. Milk protein concentrate is an example, but also increasing the fat content with something like vegetable oil or adding flavoring agents to make the result taste more like cheese.
The FDA caught Kraft singles not meeting the definition of pasteurized process cheese food something like 20 years ago which is why it's labeled a pasteurized process cheese product.
For any curious, the sodium citrate is an emulsifying agents that helps the natural cheeses used melt together smoothly, and pasteurization was originally done to prolong the life of the resultant mixed cheese as the whole original point of American cheese was to reprocess ends and scraps into something homogeneous and comparatively safe for long distance overland transport before refrigerated trucks were a thing.
Every person I've shared Altoona pizza with ironically has ended up unironically liking it, so I don't know anymore. I've never actually had it myself. Maybe this isn't any worse than Hawaiian pizza or cauliflower crust pizza?
At the end of the day though, this is just a regional food - like Cincinnati chili or Chicago hot dog - only after all the good ideas are taken, this was what was left. If they can sell one to everybody passing through Altoona just once, they've made a fair amount of money.
Cincinnati chili is beloved by Cincinnati, though...
Not even pineapple could save that.
This is not pizza.
Is this town filled with broke stoners or something?
Broke stoners in rural Pennsylvania? Say it ain't so!
Dunno about this particular area of PA, but the areas I am familiar with... the answer is meth.
Hello? I would like to report a crime against humanity.
Are those fucken Kraft singles? That's deplorable and I am disgusted beyond the spiritual realm.
Yeah, it's not a great town
There better be chilli fries under that cheese
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