Hacking Trader Joe’s Cheese Bites

Copycat Trader Joe’s Cheese Bites made with parmesan and Gran Padano

Trader Joe’s Cheese Bites and similar products are taking the world by storm. They were one of the top trends we identified at the recent Fancy Food Show in NYC. And what’s not to love? They’re delicious, full of protein and have zero carbs so they’re perfect for keto diets.

But the bites are not cheap, starting at $2.40-2.70 for a 2.11 oz (60 g) bag at Trader Joes and going up from there. So perhaps we can save some money by making an equivalent product at home? A blogger named Become Betty had already done the groundwork, identifying the cheese ratio at Trader Joes as 1 part Parmesan and 3 parts Grana Padano, an aged version of Parmesan, and recommending a cooking time of 11-14 minutes at 400 degrees for a shredded mixture.

Cheese bites on silicone pad, ready for the oven

So we set out to make ourselves a bunch of cheese bites. We bought grated parmesan for $6.99 and Gran Padano at $12.99 at our co-op and shredded the latter, then mixed them and made bites of a heaping teaspoon each. Become Betty uses a “mini muffin tray” which we didn’t have but we cooked some in a muffin pan, others heaped on a silicon pad atop a half sheet pan. In they went for 10 minutes, checked to see if they would need longer cooking time. They didn’t.

Cheese Bites cooked in muffin tins broke apart when removed

After 10 minutes the water had evaporated from the cheese and the fat had oozed out and the cheese coalesced into an appealing wafer. We got the best results from the pieces on the open silicone pad.  The ones in the muffin pan fried on the bottom and stuck when we tried to get them out, then broke into less appealing but entirely edible pieces. The verdict? Delicious, as good as Trader Joe’s.

Cheddar Cheese Bites

Next we tried a combo of one part parm, 3 parts sharp cheddar. This didn’t go well. The extra moisture in the cheddar made the wafers spread out too much when cooking but much worse, they had an ingredient that gave them a burned/bitter taste. At least we didn’t spend a lot of money on this experiment: our cheddar was just $5.99 lb.

Swiss Cheese Bites

Finally we took some cheap ($6.99/lb) swiss cheese and mixed it with parm 50/50 since the cheddar had been disappointing. This worked out well. Light, crispy, airy; one taster dubbed this the favorite of the evening.

If you have been keeping track of prices and quantities, you are guessing we saved money big time except on the Gran Padano version. But what we haven’t told you is that the amount of cheese by weight reduced almost 50% in each case as water and fat boiled away. The net cost by finished weight:

4.64 cents per gram for Gran Padano prep
1.60 cents per gram for cheddar fiasco
2.77 cents per gram for Swiss/parm mix
4.48 cents per gram for Trader Joe’s cheese bites at $2.69.

So you may or may not be saving money but it isn’t very much. If you consider that Trader Joe’s product started at around 4 ounces assuming the same attrition, that’s around $10/lb which is not bad at all for quality cheese. Meanwhile, we had a bunch of greasy pans to clean.

Now that we’ve got the basics down, we may try an all-parm version. And we’ll make some more of the Swiss for the taster who liked them. But for day to day cheese desiccation, we’ll leave it to the Trader in the future.