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Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
Perfectly Melting Cheese
Difficulty: Easy | Total Time: | Makes: About 5 cups

Making nachos at home gives you the freedom to use a tastier, fancier cheese instead of processed nacho cheese, but those nicer cheeses quickly harden, or separate and become gloppy. To keep your melted cheese perfectly smooth, Scott Heimendinger, director of applied research for Modernist Cuisine, shares this trick from the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook: Simply add sodium citrate.

What to buy: Sodium citrate, or sour salt, is an emulsifying sodium salt that comes from citric acid. It has a sour taste and is usually used as a food additive for preserving or flavoring. You can buy it online.

Special equipment: You’ll need a gram scale to measure the sodium citrate for this recipe. You’ll also need an immersion blender to combine the cheeses.

Click here to watch Scott make this easy nacho cheese in the premiere episode of our MDRN KTCHN video series.

INGREDIENTS
  • 1/2 cup cold wheat beer or water
  • 14 grams sodium citrate
  • 7 ounces Gruyère cheese, shredded (about 3 cups)
  • 6 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (about 3 cups)
INSTRUCTIONS
  1. Place the beer or water in a large saucepan, add the sodium citrate, and stir until dissolved. Bring to a simmer over medium heat.
  2. Gradually add both cheeses to the simmering liquid, using an immersion blender to combine after each addition, until all of the cheese is melted and smooth. Use immediately.
    Write a review | 16 Reviews
  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    2

    Last night, for nachos, we made this cheese sauce (using half Blue Moon beer, half water and all sharp cheddar, no swiss) and Kenji's cheese sauce for fries and nachos from Serious Eats Burger Lab (using the exact same cheese). We used a digital scale to measure all ingredients and served the sauces, in hot liquid form, over low burners, side by side in a blind tasting to see how the cheese sauces behaved once poured over chips and eaten while they cooled. While making the sauces, we found that this sauce needed considerably more liquid than the recipe above calls for; it looked gorgeous and glossy but immediately turned to book paste upon cooling... luckily we figured this out when we tasted it before serving and blended in more water+beer. Still, Kenji's sauce (which uses easy to find cornstarch and evaporated milk, not sodium citrate) won for texture hands down. It didn't turn gummy and rubbery when it cooled. This was practically inedible as it slowly came to room temperature. Even when both sauces were hot and runny, Kenji's had a much cleaner finish in the mouth. This sauce had a nice silkiness but it left behind a sticky, claggy coating, like sweetened condensed milk. The next time I play with sodium citrate I will use it in mac and cheese, or in a cheese stuffing, like for jalapeño poppers, where the slightly gelatinous texture could actually lend an advantage.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    1

    Ok, to be really honest, this cheese looks clumpy and plastic, so good luck trying to remove a chip from under that cheese. Maybe the picture should have been taken no less than 1 second after pouring it on the chos. I'm not knocking it, it just might be smooth, but I shouldn't be able to place peppers on my chos without them being swallowed by the cheese.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    I'm for guessing amounts.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    I find if I add one slice of a processed cheese single I acheive the same effect. I wonder if singles contain the sodium citrate?

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Brilliant! I have to try it.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    I made this and it didn't come out well. It was sticky and gloppy and didn't come out smooth. When you tried to spoon it out, it would create a long, thick rope between the spoon and the pot that would not break unless you cut it with a knife. If I had dumped the pan over, it would have come out in one big glop. The texture was actually very similar to silly putty. I added about 2 or 3 extra cups of water, and it smoothed out to a good consistency, so that I could pour it over chips. Honestly, I have no idea why this happened. I was using cheese with vegetable renet (from my co-op). Would that make a difference?

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Super easy nacho recipe, gotta love simple and delicious nahos! I added some of my own hot sauce, in addition to the jalapeños, to add some extra kick. Will surely be making these over and over. thank you!

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Great recipe - this has been the only way I've made nachos since Amazon sent my order of sodium citrate. I just add the jalapenos right to the cheese - instant dip. And it usually doesn't make it from the sauce pan to a bowl before it's gone. Thanks for a great idea.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    "I found out that this product can cause the following side effects: Tetany (intense sudden-onset contractions of your muscle groups), Elevated Sodium or Metabolic Alkalosis." ANYTHING that you put in your pie hole can make you sick if you eat enough of it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you would re-visit the recipe you would discover that this recipe is for 4-6 people which puts the amount of sodium citrate in each serving to 3.5 to 2.33 grams per serving. The only documented case of severe toxicity was greater than 100 times that amount.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    I made a slightly modified version of this recipe over the weekend, and it turned out great. I made 2/3 the amount of this recipe (so, 4 cups of cheese), and used 3 cups of sharp cheddar and 1 cup of jalapeno jack. For the beer, we used Tecate. The texture and taste were just like nacho cheese dip. We did use an immersion blender, but found that a regular whisk and a spoon actually worked just as well, so don't be turned off by this recipe if you don't have an immersion blender.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Will this last at a party in crock pot like the old Velveeta stuff does?

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Fantastic! Would this work with citric acid? I can get citric acid locally, but not sodium citrate.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    @doreenn, as long as you have normally functioning kidneys, this amount of sodium citrate should be fine (there's sodium citrate in a bunch of commercially sold food and drinks.). All of those effects you mentioned have to do with electrolyte levels and our kidneys are pretty neat little machines that regulate our electrolyte levels. You'd have to ingest a lot of sodium citrate to have those effects (and from a quick look at MicroMedex/PoisonDex, there's only one reported case of severe toxicity from ingestion and it was with ~500 grams of the stuff).

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    I'm a little concerned about using this because when I looked it up to find out where to purchase sodium citrate, I found out that this product can cause the following side effects: Tetany (intense sudden-onset contractions of your muscle groups), Elevated Sodium or Metabolic Alkalosis. If anyone knows if there are differences between the types of sodium citrate or any other reason it possibly wouldn't cause these symptoms, I'd love to know about it. It just makes me a little nervous.

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    Can I use any type of liquid to dissolve the Sodium Citrate? Thanks for the video. Used this to make some bomb Mac and Cheese!

  • Perfectly Melting Cheese Recipe
    5

    This is a great tip, and it works very well. Thanks for posting!

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