Cheese!!! A New Way to Make Ball Park Style Cheese Sauce

It was Sunday night, and the last football game of the weekend had come and gone so I decided to take a look at some of the other food blogs that I like to read. I paid a visit to one of my favorites, serious eats, to see what they had going on. I almost immediately came upon an article that I had to read being that I am a cheese lover. It was an article in which Kenji (the author) was trying to figure out how to make a cheese sauce that resembles the sauce that you get with nachos at a sporting event. The problem being that if you take some real cheddar and simply melt it you get an oily, and far from runny result, which is fine for those of us in need of a quick fix and happen have a bag of Tostitos, a block of cheddar, and a microwave handy. Other wise you will probably be wishing you had one of the glorious machines that dispenses a slightly spicy, runny at all temperatures, and wonderfully off tasting cheese sauce of the likes you would normally encounter at ball games and movie theaters.

This was not going to thwart Kenji, and he set out on a quest to make this possible with the use of cheddar as opposed to Velveeta. Follow this link to the full article, The Burger Lab: Cheese Sauce for Burgers, Fries, and Chips. It is a good read, and he knows way more about the food reactions than I do so I won't even attempt to paraphrase what he found. Not to totally ruin it for you, but he did find a solution, and posted a recipe for his findings. I'll post a link to the recipe at the bottom of this post so that you may all use it as I did. I had to see what this was all about. The BCS national championship game was the next day, and I had people coming to watch. So even though there was already plenty of food I decided that this was a perfect football dish, and as good of a time as any to see how it tasted.

As you can see from the first picture the ingredients are simple (I doubled them), and consist of cheddar cheese (he suggested extra sharp), corn starch, evaporated milk, and hot sauce. The measurements are easy, and the next step is to mix them all in a pan and heat until ready.

So mix and heat I did. It was not very appetizing when first mixed, but that was to be expected. I also put a lot more hot sauce into the mixture as I am a huge fan of most things spicy. The only trick is to make sure that it looses the initial grainy texture, and that you let it set up enough as to not be too runny. Other than that its genius. Super quick, easy, and well its cheese sauce so its awesome. 

Ok, so I made too much. It was good though, and it would be delicious on so many things other than as a dip (chips were sadly the only cheese sauce worthy thing I had at the time). I will be busting this out for many occasions, the Superbowl being the next frontier. Thank you Kenji for your work, and here is a link to the recipe for all to enjoy, Cheese Sauce for Cheese Fries and Nachos.


Cheddar Cheese Sauce