Will It Be Sous Vide? Processed Cheese Sauce Made From Any Cheese
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the particularly tacky episode of Will It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
The sweet, cheese sauces won the topic-making session this week , and it didn’t piss me off in the least. For a while, I wanted to play with the melting salts, so I hurriedly ordered sodium citrate from Amazon and collected many different cheeses.
Before we get into the gooey stuff, let’s talk about these melting salts , especially sodium citrate. If you’ve ever melted hard cheese like cheddar, you’ve probably noticed that it tends to flake off into a greasy mass. Sodium citrate prevents this by acting as an emulsifier, lowering the acidity of the cheese (raising the pH) and making the proteins more soluble. This, along with the addition of a little water, allows the hard chunk of cheese to melt into a creamy sauce that doesn’t flake or break.
I heard this would work for any cheese, but I found it hard to believe that this is a universal situation. Different cheeses have different levels of acidity , and it seemed unlikely that cheese like Asiago or Parma would behave like cheddar.
I decided to start with cheddar as a base – it’s hard but not like “parm hard” – and using this article as a starting point, I filled a quart-sized freezer bag with the following:
- 4 ounces of hot cheddar cheese, cut into thin slices
- 1/4 teaspoon sodium citrate
- 1/4 cup water (beer, sherry, or wine can also be used)
Then I immersed the bag in a water bath set at 167 ℉ and waited for the cheese to melt. After about five minutes, the cheddar seemed thin enough so I poured out the contents of the bag and mixed with a hand blender to emulsify everything.
It came out lumpy with watery parts that refused to cooperate, so I threw it back into the tub for another ten minutes.
Now we were going somewhere. This product had the consistency of melted cheese sauce and the taste of Tillamook cheddar. I was very pleased and very eager to try other cheeses (dill hawarty, blue crumb, Asiago and Parmesan).
I cooked each cheese like cheddar and tossed the resulting bags in the tub for 15 minutes. After spending a quarter of an hour in the tub, I pulled everyone out and hit them with a hand blender. The results were different, to put it mildly
Dill Hawarty
Surprisingly, this one came out a bit lumpy at first and looks a lot like a cheddar at the five-minute mark. As with our cheddar, this was decided by spending more time in the bath. The resulting sauce was delicious, especially when drizzled with salty chips. (I just really love dill, okay.)
Scattered blue
This one came out perfect after fifteen minutes in the bath and emulsified like in a dream. I dipped some carrots in there, but that would be better than potato chips, or – if you really want to go to some decadent place – serve with buffalo wings.
Asiago
This gave me the most trouble. As you can see in the photo above, 1/4 teaspoon of sodium citrate is just not enough for Asiago to behave well. It was lumpy and fibrous and began to harden almost immediately.
Unlike cheddar and hawarty, this problem couldn’t be solved with a lot of time, so I added another 1/4 teaspoon of melting salt and tossed it back into the water bath. After another fifteen minutes, the texture improved slightly, so I added another 1/4 teaspoon of sodium citrate plus a tablespoon of water.
That helped. While it was definitely the thickest of all the sauces, it was now at least a sauce ready to be dipped in all sorts of things. In fact, while that would be a decent sauce, I think it suits a hamburger. Asiago prepared in this way has the texture and taste of the most delicate American cheese, but does not taste like American cheese. This is a really wonderful thing.
Parmesan
Parmesan acted exactly like Asiago, but I dropped it to the floor before I could photograph it, so you just have to take my word for it.
Mix
Having determined that a wide variety of cheeses could be turned into a sauce with the power of the melting salts, I decided to try the a la fromage fort cheese blend. I knew I had a few hip dairy leftovers from a cheese plate I ate with a friend earlier that week, and as luck would have it, it turned out to be almost exactly four ounces.
I made this small collection just like that original bag of cheddar, only this time I used sherry instead of water. (This turned out to be a very good solution.) After fifteen minutes in the bath, I mixed everything and poured it into a bowl.
This cheese sauce was my favorite cheese sauce of all cheese sauces. It had not only the best, most complex taste, but also the perfect consistency. (Heres didn’t hurt either.) Without a doubt, it was a complete success.
Now we have to ask ourselves our favorite question: will there be a sous vide cheese sauce?
The answer is heck yes, although there isn’t one recipe that’s perfect for every type of cheese. However, there is a general procedure that will allow you to turn any cheese – hard or soft – into a delicate, creamy-sticky sauce:
- Start by weighing four ounces of cheese and add 1/4 cup of the liquid of your choice along with a quarter teaspoon of sodium citrate. (You can of course increase this, just make sure you increase the amount of liquid and melting salt along with the cheese.
- Put it all in a bag and place it in a bath with a temperature of 167. After fifteen minutes, beat it with a blender and see how it behaves. If it turns into a silky sauce, you’re done! Stop here and enjoy your crappy creation. But if the cheese doesn’t play well, go to step 3.
- If your sauce has small lumps (like our cheddar and hawarty did in the beginning), just put it back in the bag and leave a little more in the tub. However, if your cheese turns into one large mass, clumps and clogs the blender blades, you need a little more sodium citrate. Add another 1/4 teaspoon, return to the bath for another fifteen minutes and try stirring again. Repeat until you reach the desired consistency.
Once you’ve prepared the sauce, you can start dipping. I recommend enjoying it pretty quickly as it will turn into a Velveeta-like mass over time, but it warms up quite easily in a bain-marie with a gentle whisk, or you can just toss it back into sous vide. ( Edited to add: While this may sound a little “complicated,” keep in mind that while you can easily cook these sauces on the stovetop, you can make a whole bunch of different sauces at once using your immersion circulator.)