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Constructed cheeses

matthew.snyder77

Page 4-224 of MC has a recipe for an American Cheese Slice, using Swiss as the base. The hamburger episode of "In Search of Perfection" has a different recipe using Comté cheese and a sherry vinegar infusion.

My question is this: Will either recipe/method work with any melty-type cheese as a base? Or were the recipes developed specifically for those cheeses?

I notice the citation of Muenster as a good alternative in the MC discussion of constructed cheeses, which I'm considering boosting with the infused vinegar from the "Perfection" recipe. How does that affect the pH balance? I mean, obviously vinegar will make it more acidic, but what will be the target pH of that mixture?

Intended application is for a cheeseburger.

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seijoed

@Matthew - I'll let the pros answer the complete question but I've had stellar success with a variety of cheeses and just warm water and sodium citrate.

Jack_Mayer_85396

Can't wait, my sodium citrate is on order. Should have it next week.

Chris_Young_80640

The science of so-called "melting salts" is remarkably complex.

Essentially, a salt like sodium citrate helps keep molten cheese homogenous and well-emulsified by giving up sodium ions in exchange for calcium ions found in the cheese. This is also known as sequestration. This action helps keep the casein-gel structure from shrinking and squeezing moisture and fat out of the molten cheese mixture. The actual emulsification of the milkfat and water is still done by the casein proteins, so the melting salts just help the natural proteins do a better job of emulsifying.

Sodium citrate will only do this when the pH is above 3.0—so be careful about adding vinegar to make the cheese slightly more tart.

Melting salts, like sodium citrate, also help keep the cheese emulsified by slightly raising the pH to around 5.6 to 5.9 (younger cheeses tend to be around 5.0 and mature cheeses are around 5.5). So again, adding acid or acidic ingredients like wine, can actually make it more difficult to keep cheese emulsified.

The sodium citrate that most people are buying to make the cheese is trisodium citrate, which is what I used for the cheese slice featured in Perfection and was also used extensively in MC.

Commercially, there are many melting salts and usually a blend of these salts is used to get better results. Sodium citrate cheese that are melted, cast, and then cooled tend to be crumbly. Adding a bit of phosphate salts, such as sodium hexametaphosphate, in addition to just sodium citrate will often give better results. (A place like Modernist Pantry sells sodium hexametaphosphate for spherification).

Finally, the older the cheese, the more difficult it is to ever get a smooth melting product. That's because over time the proteins in the cheese become so fragmented that they have almost no emulsifying capacity left. The comte we used for the Perfection series was actually quite difficult to keep emulsified, and if I were redoing that recipe, I would probably blend in some younger, soft cheese that has a mild flavor. Muenster is a good cheese to work with because it's younger, but it does have a distinct flavor. I would probably look to something like a mild gruyere if I wanted to feature the distinct flavor of something like Comte and Parmesan.

And yes, I would be careful about adding acid. The more acidic ingredients I add, like wine, the more melting salts I need to add to counter the acid and raise the pH. And if the pH falls below 3.0, sodium citrate will no longer function at all.

seijoed

@Chris - AWESOME! You just described the problems I had with parmesan.

matthew.snyder77

That's incredibly useful info, thanks @Chris.

I think I mis-remembered the Perfection cheese slice... was it just sherry and not sherry vinegar?

Oh, and #sequestration. Ha, now political junkies will find this thread in their Twitter feeds.

seijoed

@Matthew - Hahaha!

Jack_Mayer_85396

@Chris thanks for the detailed explanation! I think you just pre-empted a few mistakes.

Brendan_Lee_56950

I guess I will have to start PH testing my favorite cheeses to build a database. Thanks for the info @chris