The image says any cheese…
This is false.
There are two main categories of cheese, Acid and Rennet.
If the cheese is made with Rennet, it will melt, and sodium citrate will make it smooth and creamy.
If the cheese is made with acid, then it will never melt. It will burn first. Think Feta or similar.
The exception is very long aged cheeses. They don’t melt all that well, even though they’re made with Rennet.
Every Rennet cheese is aged, if only a few weeks, acid cheeses will spoil if aged.
The pedantic chemist in me can’t let me upvote this meme. It’s too forced. The “NaCHO” isn’t even the empirical formula.
Bechemel sauces are good, but they aren’t cheesy enough for something like queso or Mac and cheese
I’ve tinkered with it but past a certain point the consistency gets weird in my experience. Maybe it’s my combo of cheeses or something. I honestly think it’s the milk that fucks with the flavor moreso than the flour and butter. You can get it tasting alright but once you try to get it at the right thickness by adding more milk the taste just goes to hell
I just watched James Dingley’s Atomic Frontier video on cheese talk about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bISFxFauTzM
Just wanted to pop by and say that the rest of the world is horrified that Americans eat this puddle of nonsense
It’s real cheese, it’s just got sodium citrate,
And you can make sodium citrate at home with 4.9 grams of baking soda and 3.7 grams of citric acid. Add about 15 ml of water to start the reaction and wait. The cool thing about this reaction is that there shouldn’t be any side products beyond some co2 and a little water.
Anyway, you’ll get about 5 grams of sodium citrate dissolved in water. (and you can safely boil off the water to get pure sodium citrate powder)
Which is far more than you need to make a pot of melty goodness.
Now, you could just make a béchamel and slowly melt a young cheese into it, but that’s never going to taste the same. Sodium citrate adds in just a little extra tartness, while also making the cheese so creamy that it’s kind of hard to describe for those who’ve not had it.
Nope. They almost all have real cheese. Usually a mild cheddar. It’s then melted with sodium citrate and pasteurized for a longer shelf life (while still being creamy and tender)
It tastes slightly more tart than straight cheddar, but that’s it. Well, slightly more tart than a mild cheddar. A sharp cheddar is just as tart, but it’s a slight difference in flavor.
Potentially information bleed over. You can use some American Singles cheese to smooth out cheeses in other dishes because it contains emulsifiers (I think, or another compound), but Nacho Cheese is a specific kind of cheese that should be free of American cheese byproduct
It’s just a form of citric acid – if you put lemon juice or wine in (which a lot of recipes, including the one my swiss grandfather uses, do) then you get the same result.