Start with a bechamel, then add not too much actual cheese, and you likely will end up with a creamy mac & cheese. To cheat, use a pinch of sodium citrate. No more, as the cheese will refuse to let go of your pan.
2 Likes
You know what I’ve tried a thousand variations on the bechamel, its the standard way to make a cheese sauce. It sucks. The high amount of flour dulls the flavor of the cheese. And its always, always a bit grainy or chalky. From the cheese breaking or just the grittiness of the flour. Even in mac and cheese. Your sauce might be nice and creamy. For about 2 minutes before it has time to cool in the least. For Mac and Cheese better go with Patti Labelle: A custard based sauce. That method existed before Patti Labelle. But she popularized it, and now “Labelle” is basically synonymous with a custard based cheese sauce. For cheese sauce things like this work far, far better:
There are a bunch of variations of that approach. But all of them tend to clip ideas from processed cheese products. And both Patti Labelle’s mac and cheese a lot of the good cheese sauce recipes tend to involve at least a small proportion of processed cheese. The stabilizers they contain add insurance. A lot of the sciencey/modernist approaches just add those stabilizers (or similar) direct. Including recipes like this one:
Which is basically just _making processed cheese at home. _
2 Likes
Honestly I take a utilitarian approach: Does it simulate the texture, taste, and mouth feel reasonably well? Yes. Then Ok.
Same reason I’ll consume a “frosty” or any “ice cream” from a Taylor soft serve machine.
Hell, sliced processed bullshit is a lot closer to actual American than soft-serve “ice-cream” is to actual ice cream. Especially if it’s on a regular cheeseburger or any burger designed to be kind of gross/cheap/tacky/trashy.
1 Like
I forgot that cheese cowboy thing ever existed. The sad thing is now that I’m reminded of the sight of it I can probably sing the jingle from memory.
1 Like
'Murican plastic sheeting, well your basically talking about an attempt to build cheese from its constituant chemical parts. Using whatevers left over after you make real cheese. It’s weird stuff. It’ll get you there but I’m not about to snack on it at 2am.
There’s cheese and cheese…
Vimes cut into a sausage and stared. "What is _in_ these? All this ... pink stuff?" he demanded. "Er, that's meat, your grace," said Inigo, on the other side of the table. "Well, where's the texture? Where's the white bits and the yellow bits and those green bits you always hope are herbs?" "To a connoisseur here, your grace, an Ankh-Morpork sausage would not be considered a sausage, mmph, mmhmm." "Oh, really? So what would he call it?" "A loaf, your grace. Or possibly a log. Here, a butcher can be hanged if his sausages are not all meat, and at that it must be from a named domesticated animal, and I perhaps should add that by named I do not mean that it should have been called 'Spot' or 'Ginger', mmm mmhmm. I'm sure that if your grace would prefer the more genuine Ankh-Morpork taste, Igor could make up some side dishes of stale bread and sawdust."
5 Likes
It depends. I have had some good mild cheddar when I was in England. Not that stuff they call cheddar in the States.
EDIT: I am otherwise going to avoid all discussion, as there are few cheeses in the United States that I like. I especially hate the taste of American cheese in any form, and hated cheeseburgers until I discovered Emmentaler. I can now state that I like about half of the European cheeses, types like Mozzarella, Pecorino, Grana Pradano, Manchego, Emmentaler, Camembert or Cheddar. Gouda, despite its similarity to Emmentaler does not appeal to me, nor does Maasdamer.
1 Like
Most Americans have never had tomato soup that wasn’t made by Campbell’s. I’m glad my tastes are more refined than theirs. Enjoy eating salty shit; as a matter of fact, have another portion!
Many years ago, my parents opened the front door to find a big box of government food sitting there. Flour, rice, and cheese. They called around and were told it had been delivered by accident, but to keep it.
The cheese looked like Velveeta, but it refused to melt in the microwave. It just got really hot, a hunk of square hot unmelted cheese. I wonder if it was Imitation Pasteurized Process Cheese or just plastic.
2 Likes
Don’t tell Vimes that! You’ll put CMOT Dibbler out of business!
3 Likes
Growing up, the recipe I used to make mac & cheese involved 2 or 3 Tbs of flour and an equal amount of butter/margarine, to which (once cooked) was slowly added warm milk, grated (real) Cheddar cheese, and a small amount of mustard powder. Always thick and creamy, never flour-y, and that was without using much better melting cheeses like Fontina or Gruyere. Maybe you’re using too much flour?
6 Likes
the thousand variations used various volumes of flour. But the volume of flour for a proper bechamel is always tied to making a standard roux. Equal portions flower and fat. Which will thicken a specific amount of liquid to the proper thickness. Usually about a tblsp of roux per cup of liquid, but it varies based on which liquid and just how much you want to thicken that sauce. I understand all that pretty well.
I also understand the roux. And how it works. And have no problem with thickening sauces and soups with roux. To various textures and so on. The issue is with the cheese. Once you start moving into a mornay/cheese sauce you’ve got an issue. Cheese is an emulsion, melt it and that emulsion wants to break. In a bechamel based cheese sauce there is very little to prevent that. The flour based roux provides starch that can act as a stabilizer. But how much you need is a function of how much cheese you use. And the more flour involved the more dulls it the cheese, and the closer you move to a paste texture instead of a thickened milk one. And its absolutely a function of temperature. Even a little bit of cooling starts things getting grainy. Cool entirely and reheat and they break, leading to dry ass mac and cheese.
As a result Bechamel based recipes that remain creamy tend not to contain very much cheese. Which impacts flavor. You end up with something that tastes more like a cream sauce flavored with cheese, than like melted cheese. And lacks for gloss and gooey texture. More cheese tends to come with “tricks” to add more stabilization. Evaporated milk (more protein to keep things stable) or adding some proportion of processed cheese.
Since you can get better, more stable results without the roux. Something that is basically stabilized melted cheese. More cheese than milk and flour. I prefer to go that route. Its less finicky and gets you closer to where you want to be.
3 Likes
I believe it’s a hidden message. The lower-case letters from “SaNDWiCH SLiCeS” begin to spell out the designer’s cry of anguish.
3 Likes
I missed this part on the first outing. I work in a NY Pizza Place (in part, run the bar in the connected Italian Restaurant). Classic, real NY Pizza is not cheep ass. Crappy. Or inferior to “artisinal” product.
We use high grade bakers flours, the same product used by the hipster places. Its made into a high hydration dough by a guy with 40 years of experience in professional baking. Gets an over night rise/ferment. The cheeses we use are quality shit. The low moisture Moz costs us more whole sale that super market brands cost you retail. Our “Parmesan” is a small batch, high quality American Grana that costs more than imported Parmesan Reggiano. The sauce takes 6 hours to make, from high quality canned imported tomato products (fresh are too seasonal/inconsistent). And so on and so forth.
All for a sub 20 pizza, largely pushed take out or by the slice. There’s no end of shitty pizza in NY these days. Especially with the proliferation of 99 cent turn and burn operations. But that’s not the right way to do it. And for the most part its not NY pizza.
3 Likes
I would prefer high-quality traditional food to the eco-friendly local-sourced organic hipster knockoff. The original thing is the original, and slapping a bunch of trendy buzzwords on the knockoff doesn’t make it any better. The non-hipster place uses top quality ingredients too, because restaurant quality food comes from restaurant quality ingredients, period, not the same type of stuff that’s rotting on the shelves in the supermarkets.
Also can we talk about “gourmet sliders”? Calling White Castle burgers sliders isn’t exactly a compliment. They’re sliders because they’re small and super greasy and you can slide them down your throat without chewing. Nothing gourmet about that. Besides, why would I want a kimchi pulled pork whatever gourmet slider when I could have a quarter pound no-frills burger that just tastes like fire and dead animal?
2 Likes
I grew up with White Castle down the street; calling their burgers “sliders” was kind of like calling a taco truck a “roach coach”. It’s been bizarre and hilarious to me to see tiny burgers on every snazzy restaurant get dubbed “sliders”.
4 Likes
It’s low-class food for high-class people people with more money than common sense.
I would rather someone do the inverse and make gourmet food more accessible, rather than elevate sliders and street food to something they’re not and something they can’t be.
3 Likes
If it tastes good and is well made I’m going to eat it.
And your wishful thinking on restaurant food quality is a bit adorable. A significant portion of “non-hipster” cheap and casual sit down restaurants in this country are pushing low grade ingredients from Syco. All of it lower quality than the stuff “rotting” on supermarket shelves. And much of it pre-prepped or pre-cooked. Its not materially different that eating at Applebees.
Now in certain areas, major metro areas especially, there are still plenty of old school places still doing it right. But there are big stretches of this country where only the “hipster” places are actually cooking food well. Or actually cooking at all. The “hipster” part (which in my experience is usually leveled at any place with slightly higher prices that the speaker would like) just helps convince people to pay closer to what the food should cost. So places can avoid cutting costs by going the Sysco/turn and burn route.
The restaurant business is perilously low margin. Overall profits on a single restaurant average nationally at less than 10%. Bars are closer to 15-20%. Which is insane. And even at that higher price point you’re seeing in the newer style places you aren’t really paying the full cost of the food. Because so much of the employee pay is put off on the diner. That 20% standard tip? Yeah that’s payroll the owner doesn’t have to pay us. Cooks pay has traditionally been kept as close to minimum wage as possible, with no. I repeat no. Benefits of any kind. No breaks, no health care, no days off, no sick days. With the glut of restaurants out there cooks suddenly have the ability to extract fairer pay (there is a serious staffing shortage in food/bev right now. Both FOH and BOH). But Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay what a plate of food should cost. So profit margins in many markets are shrinking.
5 Likes
You know “Philadelphia” was given that name ironically, right?
1 Like
High amount of flour?! You’re doing Mornay wrong. The only flour involved should be the couple of tablespoons you start the base roux with — a 1:1 butter:flour ratio. If whatever cheese you’re using isn’t melting smoothly, add a healthy splash of white wine, as with fondue. The acid breaks down the long stretchy molecule chains. I’ve never used @IronEdithKidd’s suggestion of sodium citrate but maybe that works similarly. You’re probably more likely to have a bottle of wine around though.
For something like mac & cheese, mix the Mornay into the macaroni and top with a shredded melty cheese before baking/broiling. Breadcrumbs and various spices optional. I have never ever had it come out gritty or greasy.
3 Likes
