American cheese (left) has chemical salts that help it melt
smoothly. Cheddar (right) breaks as it melts.To get a cheesy sauce that’s shiny and smooth, not greasy
or stringy, requires three things:
Keeping the fat globules from separating out and pooling
- Adding moisture to thin the texture
- Figuring out a way to keep the proteins from breaking
apart and rejoining into long strands
Well, how the heck do you do all that? Luckily for us, all
of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
In this case, I didn’t want cheese that would go rapidly from
solid to liquid I wanted cheese that softened linearly over
time, which meant that a starch should be my thickener and
stabilizer of choice.
Some cheese sauce recipes call for béchamel—a flour-
thickened milk-based sauce—as the base. I don’t like how it
works out both in terms of texture (a cheesy béchamel is