American Cheese and Sodium Citrate (Recipes and Instructions)

Hi Everyone, 

Life is getting better for me, things have calmed down a bit and I'm nesting again as a renter for another year. Hopefully the spring of 2020 will bring me a property suitable to buy! Until then, I'm getting back to normal, which means...

CHEESE!!!

I took on an easy project this week, American Cheese. If you think of Kraft Singles or Velveeta, you're on the right track!

Ideally I would have made this with my homemade cheeses, but since I didn't have any made for nearly a year now (eek!) I headed to my local cheese shop for some good cheeses to use in this. Anyone can make it, it's so easy!

And it melts well! My cheese is white because I used white Cheddar, but if you use orange Cheddar, you'll get a nice orange colour to it.

The ingredients are simple, here is the recipe!
Click here for a printable copy of the American Cheese recipe.
Click here for a printable copy of the Sodium Citrate recipe.

American Cheese

Ingredients

For the cheese:

1 tsp Kosher salt

150ml whole milk

2 tbsp butter

4 tsp Sodium Citrate (you can make this at home, I'll show you how!)

300g shredded Cheddar

300g shredded Monterey Jack, Colby or really any other cheese you like

For the Sodium Citrate:

1/4 cup filtered water

25g citric acid

33g baking soda

Directions

Make your Sodium Citrate: Mix the water and citric acid together in an oven proof dish. Slowly add the baking soda. It will fizz like crazy because it's releasing CO2. It took me about 20 minutes to mix the baking soda into the mixture before it stopped fizzing and looked more clear. Bake in a 250F oven for about 3-4 hours until it's crystallized. It'll take some elbow grease to scrape it all off the pan, but do it, you need it! The last step is to make it into a powder. I have a mortar and pestle which works very well.

Make your Cheese: 

1. Shred your cheeses before you start! 

2. Add the salt, milk, butter and Sodium Citrate to a pot. Mix well and heat to a simmer.

3. Add the shredded cheese a little at a time until it melts smoothly.

4. Pour into a buttered foil loaf pan (or any other mould). Act quickly because it hardens fast! Cover with plastic wrap and keep in the fridge overnight.

After one night in the fridge, it hardened pretty well, though there was some milk residue on the corners which I blotted off with a paper towel. It easily came out of the buttered pan. Next time I will make half the recipe because it really only keeps about 2 weeks max in the fridge since there are no preservatives. But dang if it ain't a good American Cheese!!! :)

I got this idea from Larry at Deep South Texas. Click on the link to see his video!