The Slice Cheese Shootout

Most of us assume: "Diet food must taste crappy! How can something taste good without all that fat and sugar and the wonderful but unhealthy stuff they put into the food?"

There's celery and brocolli. Healthy but oh-so-nasty tasting too. But there's lowfat milk vs full-cream milk where there are supporters on both sides, health-conscious people or not. Coke Light vs Coke (they taste really similar) and so on.

How about slice cheese? We shall find out. As they had the reduced fat and extra light versions of Kraft Singles on offer in NTUC, there is really no better time to do this.

The contenders:


Regular


All that cheesy creamy goodness of regular cheese. Kraft's one of the better brands. It's made with 'cheese from cow's milk', which probably refers to the same thing as the 'cheddar cheese' in the ingredients of the other 2 varieties. And also cream.

Reduced Fat


They claim that this has 25% less fat. It's made with cheddar cheese and cottage cheese (to replace cream). Normally this is sold at a significant price premium.

Extra Light


This has only a third of the fat of regular cheese and has more proteins and carbohydrates to compensate for that. It's made of reduced fat cheddar cheese and cottage cheese. Again, this is sold at a price premium.

The lowdown on the nutritional values:


The photography rig for all the cheese shots. A Canon A520 with the white-balance callibrated manually, so you can be assured that all the cheeses appear as they are:


Randomisation:

In the nature of all true blind tests, randomisation was done by another person. I asked my dad to write down the last digit of the barcode onto the inner wrapper of the cheese slices, then pack the remaining slices away.



Water to cleanse the palate after each tasting, and pen and paper:


And after the tasting, the results:


Half-eaten slices:


Finally, the blinding was lifted and results annotated with the cheese type. Both Dad and I participated.

Results
From first look, you can see that the cheese slices are all of different colours.


My opinions, neatly tabulated:

Regular is the definite winner here. However, Dad prefers the Reduced Fat version for its less strong cheese taste, since he is not really much of a cheese lover.

Conclusion:
In terms of taste, the regular cheese wins hands down.

However, if you're into low-fat foods, both the Reduced Fat and Extra Light versions are worthwhile choices. While the taste of the Reduced Fat version is superior, it has about double the fat of the Extra Light, so it's a close fight between keeping your fat intake low and tickling your taste buds.