No-fat cheese: Swissful thinking.

Wanna make a million bucks?

Just figure out how to produce a good-tasting fat-free cheese.

Kraft tried ... and failed. So did Healthy Choice, Alpine Lace, Weight Watchers, and Borden. Ditto for Polly-O and Sorrento. At least that's what we decided after tasting dozens of no-fat cheeses for this article.

We hate to say it, but when you take all the fat out of cheese, it loses its cheesiness. Some brands were chalky or gritty. Others went overboard with fillers and ended up more like flavorless chewing gum than cheddar. Many had a sour or bitter aftertaste. And almost all looked and felt like plastic when we tried to melt them.

We did manage to find a handful of lower-fat mozzarellas, swisses, and cheddars that tasted more or less like the real thing. But they had too much artery-clogging saturated fat to eat without keeping careful count of the number of slices or chunks.

BY THE NUMBERS

Why spend so much effort searching for a good-tasting no-fat or low-fat cheese? Because regular cheese is such bad news.

Just one ounce of full-fat swiss, cheddar, or most other cheeses contains eight or nine grams of fat, five or six of which are saturated - the kind that put the Mercedes in your cardiologist's garage.

Eat an ounce of regular cheese - a puny 1 1/2-inch cube of hard cheese or 1 1/3 slices of American - and you'll have downed nearly a third of your entire day's quota of saturated fat. And that's not counting the sat fat from the hamburger it's melted on, the 2% milk you poured over your cereal this morning, your afternoon ice cream snack, or the pepperoni pizza you sent out for at dinnertime.

Convinced?

We were. Which is why we set out to find the best-tasting low-fat and no-fat cheeses. Our speed limit: no more than three grams of fat and 300 milligrams of sodium in an ounce. We couldn't go higher than three grams because, for most cheeses, two of the three would be saturated fat. That's ten percent of your daily sat fat limit in just a couple of bites.

Luckily, when cheese loses its fat, its calcium usually stays behind. An ounce of regular cheese delivers an impressive 20 percent of a day's worth (15 percent for mozzarella or feta). Lower-fat varieties range from 10 to 40 percent, depending on whether the fat's been cut by adding water or extra skim milk. You'll find the percentage of a day's calcium (% DV) listed in the "Nutrition Facts" label.

* Mozzarella. If any cheese could have good taste and little fat, this is the one. After all, regular mozzarella isn't exactly a flavor powerhouse. At six grams of fat per ounce, it's the leanest full-fat cheese. (Part-skim mozzarella, by the way, is a fraud. It has five grams of fat.)

Sure enough. Sargento Preferred Light, Polly-O Lite, and Sorrento Lite, each at three grams of fat, had a nice-if-bland mozzarella flavor. Polly-O Lite String Cheese is the best bet for your kid's lunchbox.

As for zero-fat mozzarellas, Sorrento Fat Free tasted like dry cream cheese, and Healthy Choice Fat Free and Kraft Healthy Favorites Fat Free had no taste at all, as far as we could tell.

Melting these no-fatties on bread didn't do anything to improve their flavor, though it did make them look like blobs of congealed plastic. You might not notice the odd texture if you use the cheese in a casserole.

* Cheddar. Here again, no fat equals no taste. Kraft Healthy Favorites and Healthy Choice both struck out, even when we melted them. To get halfway decent flavor we had to turn to Cabot 75% Less Fat Light, the only cheddar math three grams of fat per ounce. It's also one of the few cheeses that use the safe fat substitute Simplesse, which is made from whey (milk) protein. (If your supermarket doesn't stock cheese from the small Vermont company, ask it to. Or call 1-800-639-3198. You can order by phone ... for a price.)

If you can't find the Cabot, you'll have to jump to five grams of fat (we liked Cracker Barrel 1/3 Less Fat).

* Swiss. If you're a fan of real swiss - lightly waxy with a subtle tang that lingers long after you've swallowed - pick up some Jarlsberg Lite or Sargento Preferred Light, which were just above our recommended fat range.

* Process. Nine of the 12 "Best Bite" contenders had too much sodium to qualify. That left Weight Watchers Fat Free Reduced Sodium (which had an offtaste), Smart Beat Fat Free Slices (ditto), and three Alpine Lace Fat Frees (American, Cheddar, and Mozzarella), which were at least palatable. When we melted them over bread, though, all our "Best Bites" seemed to develop a bitter, sour after-taste (we never could get the Alpine Lace Mozzarella to melt - it just sat there).

* Cheese Alternatives. While they're made from soy or some other non-dairy product, most aren't for vegetarians (many contain the milk protein casein - check the label). Taste ranged from none (Zero-Fat Rella) to oddly nutty (Almond Rella) to even more oddly meaty (Hemp Rella). Eating a piece of White Wave Soy-A-Melt Fat Free wasn't unlike chomping on an eraser.

The Cheese Log

"Best Bites" contain no more than three grams of fat and 300 milligrams of sodium in one ounce (about 1 1/3 slices, 1/4 cup shredded, or a 1 1/2" cube). Taste wasn't a consideration in choosing them. Within each category, cheeses are ranked from 1) least to most total fat, 2) least to most saturated fat, and 3) least to most sodium. All fat numbers have been rounded to the nearest gram.

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