Provel cheese

From Free net encyclopedia

Provel™ cheese is a white cheese that is very popular in St. Louis, Missouri. It is a processed cheese composed of cheddar, swiss, and provolone. Provel cheese is very soft with a gooey and almost buttery texture. Provel's low melting point makes it the key ingredient in St. Louis-style pizza, most notably Imo's Pizza. It is also common on salads and on chicken. While very popular in the St. Louis area, Provel cheese is almost unknown elsewhere. Image:Provel.jpg According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch food critic Joe Bonwich[1], Provel cheese was invented expressly for St. Louis-style pizza more than a half-century ago by a defunct St. Louis firm called Costa Grocery (now Roma Grocery in the Hill neighborhood of St. Louis), in conjunction with a Wisconsin cheese company named Hoffman (now part of Kraft Foods). Bonwich says that Provel was originally developed to meet perceived demand for a pizza cheese with a "clean bite" - one that melts well but still breaks off nicely when you bite into it. Neither of Bonwich's sources at Kraft and Roma had a definitive answer for the origin of the name, although one popular theory is that it's a combination of the words provolone and mozzarella, two of the cheeses for which it is substituted.

The trademark on the Provel name is currently held by the Churny Co.