Can you actually taste the difference between a regionally protected food and an ordinary alternative?
In this taste test, we’re putting PDO/DOP-certified foods up against similar products that don’t carry the protected designation, but there’s a catch: no one knows which is which.
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0:00 Understanding PDO
0:30 Potato tasting challenge
7:22 Prosciutto di Parma testing
12:31 Halloumi versus grilling cheese
17:53 Champagne versus sparkling wine
36 Comments
Hi Ben FYI Australia does Not use the term Champagne for its local sparkling wines. It hasn’t done so since 2011 by agreement with the EU
The whole champagne "but it's XY thousand workers in this place" argument falls apart when you consider that it was even more workers in other places producing champagne for a very long time before the PDO became a thing and they were told they couldn't anymore. It's not exactly a niche, lost process being protected, it's pure geopolitics in a way that a lot of other PDOs really haven't been.
What dish did they make with the halloumi?! Looks amazing!
I make a point of not buying overpriced PDO or anything EU bureacrats got their hands on.
I firmly believe that this should still be triple testing, 2 same 1 different. Without that its too easy for the brain to create a kind of sameness bias where it essentially cannot identify differences therefore it makes up differences.
23:45 I know it's a rich people problem, but if you charge me for the pricey stuff and then give me the cheaper alternative, you're not getting away with basically robing me.
Cashel blue from Ireland is a similar to RockFort , Humboldt fog from California is also very unique ?
What a really interesting episode ❤
Loved it and learned so much!
Thanks guys!
Love Sorted Foods
👍😃
Testes, you say? 0:35
Here's what I took away: the designation is about the process and location, not it being "better." Second, when something does taste better in nuanced ways, make it the star of the dish, not merely an aspect of it.
Yes you can sometimes taste the difference, but it doesn’t always justify the price tag. Both sparkling wines went through a similar process with similar overheads and manufacturing costs. No reason that one costs £17 and one costs £50.
Hah my aunt called these 'pig potatoes' because the small potatoes were not worth peeling so they were fed to the pigs.
And now we consider them a delicacy 🙂 how the times change eh.
As one of the 94% of humans that aren't in Europe, I also think the obsession with monopolized "traditional" production practices is partially a marketing technique and way of creating artificial scarcity for European exports. Europe doesn't actually have all that much to export, hence why it spent most of the last 200 years pillaging the world. Now that the empires are gone, they sell their former victims little bits of their "superior" culture.
I was hoping you would touch on the DOP/DOC distinction. Maybe in a future video?
EDIT : My bad, Ben mentions it at 18:40!
The C stand for "controllata/controlled" and the logo is blue rather than red. In my understanding, a DOC have more lax requirements than a DOP, for exemple the food might be from a particular country rather than a specific town.
PDO system is alright for some foods, and completely unnecessary for others. Especially the region-controlled ones where the region has no effect on the flavour of the product.
Even when I chose halloumi with the actual word on the label, they're still quite different from what I've had in restaurants in Cyprus
My teen walked in right when Ben said "I've organized a little game to play with our testees" And she gave me the craziest, confused look and said "What the heck did I just walk in on????" and it took me a second to realize why she said that and I'm sorry Ben I was dying from laughing so hard…especially when, to prove you were talking about test subjects I turned on CC and the damn text said "testes" instead 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Maybe its just where im from but to me clearly labeling where something is from and the ingredients is whats important not the name. The brand can market itself if it uses tradional methods. I guess its because most of those DPO products have versions made locally to me and clearly (one might even say proudly) labelled as local.
I might feel differently if I was from one of those regions.
But if a name has been for a type of food produced in a certain way then why should being made the same way just grown and produced elsewhere be required to use a generic name? Maybe if it was a product made with ingredients from anywhere with a completely different process that was just mimicing the end result you'd want that made clear.
I suppose my attitude comes from living far away from these areas and never having (and likely never will unless I travel there) tasted any of the food from these places so the names aren't associated with the places but rather with categories for me.
Uhhh mad slander there to Aussies! Australia only uses champagne for champagne. Australian producers use the term sparkling wine for domestic product. We have the Wine Act that protects a lot of the accepted appellations, including champagne.
Oh my god Ben. You're doing this just for me now aren't you? "Proshootio"? Check where the "i" is. There's no "io". It's "proshooto". And while I'm here, learn how to pronounce "wagyu" the lot of you. Hint: It isn't "wagoo".
You can't label non-AOC Champagne as "champagne" in Australia, Ben. We call it sparkling wine. I'm glad you enjoy pretending to be an expert in front of "normals", but you're full of AOC merde.
I love these taste tests, it really helps with shopping.
I ALWAYS go DOP for Parmesan cheese. I also like older Parmesans (40+ month). Being in the U.S. means I have to import it or go to one of a handful of specialty store in the whole country; which often makes importing it myself cheaper.
When I play games with my testes, I don’t film it and definitely don’t upload it to YouTube.
Love episodes like this. For me PDO, ACO, DPO are not just about taste but also about authenticity. So many foods in these categories are made the traditional way, often still in small batches by hand and its about supporting and valuing those techniques, traditions and foods. Today so many foods can simply be cheaper copy-cat foods, that can often look the same but made using cheaper methods, ingredients or mass produced and full of chemicals. We need to savour and respect the traditional way of our foods and their culture and heritage and these special PDO's etc let you know you are buying the geniniue thing. Often great taste accompanies that as standard.
PDO or DOP protects the original method of production. Unfortunately that doesn't mean it's the best. There could certainly be improvement through different methods. Original doesn't mean better. A 1950 classic car is original but probably not nearly as safe, comfortable, reliable, etc as a modern car. Nostalgic yes, better? Possibly but not necessarily
I’ve always wondered if caviar would be PDO if it just originated from a different country
Well the Jersey Royals were given away with clues!
I read a book about terroir for specific foods and found the unique environments and their effects on foods very interesting. But terroir could match the areas where PDO and DPO are in multiple places…? Perhaps?
Loved the super nerdy energy❤
Is this for UK only. Never heard of it in US.
I'd love to se you do an episode on gluten free food. My boyfriend is gluten and lactose intolerant and i dont know what or how to cook for him. Surely there are things that naturally are gluten free but sometimes you want a nice burger, pizza or other bread based foods. How do you make it taste good? Many gluten free alternatives tastes shit to be honest.
As a fun (or maybe sad) counterpart of DOP (or in fact AOC in this case), a small village in Switzerland, named Champagne (just like the french region) was prohibited from using the name Champagne on their wine. This happened eventhough the wine production in this place is documented since the 9th century and the winemakers never tried to copy the sparkling wine (most of the production is white non-sparkling wine).
If that wasn't enough, a business making "salty bread sticks" since 1934 had to lose the name "Champagne" written on the packages.
It's a great example of huge companies destroying smaller ones that didn't ask for nothing.
These bros are very handsome! They aged well.
I think PDO/DOP is important. Because a lot of the things that are PDO/DOP are this way because they come from a specific region where something specific there makes it taste the way it does. Like grass there has a specific property that does something to the taste and so the product can only taste like this if the animal has eaten that grass and its milk has then been treated in a certain way. And so it makes sense to protect it, so that others can not use the name and make you think you are getting that product when you are not.
I miss pass it on!!! I love the new content too.