How to Make American Cheese with Larry from Deep South Texas

look at iCard nerds when larry from deep south texas challenged me to make American cheese I was a bit skeptical because I suppose not skeptical skeptical is not the word cautious I suppose because I had said in many of my asked the cheese man live sessions that I would never make American cheese so here we are this video is going to be about how to make American cheese however one caveat it had one ingredient that was foreign to the cheese making process and that is sodium citrate now sodium citrate is a simple salt that is easily made at home and in fact I made sodium citrate myself using sodium bicarbonate and citric acid and it's a very simple process you go through to make the sodium citrate powder anyway I thought because I love I have a love of chemistry as will that I'd take up Larry's challenge so let's see what Larry had to say about me and never making processed cheese I started watching Gavin Weber's youtube channel about six years ago and he inspired me to make my own cheese and I've been making cheese for the last six years and always trying to come up with a cheese that will melt well so one of the first things I do with every cheese when it's ready is make a grilled cheese sandwich to see how it melts some of them don't melt at all some of them get a little bit soft and some of them melt a little bit around the edges so I haven't really achieved my goal of making a cheese that melts well so I'm going to try making my own American cheese well let's see what my number 1 cheese making mentor has say about it if it doesn't taste like cheese and pretends to be cheesed that is terrible for me as well so many processed cheese's I think are disgusting because they I had far too many additives I don't have enough cheese and they're not made in the traditional manner I'm a bit of a purist as far as making cheese good well Gavin doesn't have a good opinion about processed cheese but without it how are you going to make that melty grilled cheese sandwich or that classic American cheeseburger nothing else melts like American cheese but then as I was watching one of Gavin's live streams I heard something that just knocked me off my feet let's take a look at that wave oh I have had a recipe on how to make American shoes so those people who've been asking me what seasons I've been asking me to make American cheese which is a processed cheese I have found a recipe and I'm thinking of so did you see that not only is Gavin thinking about making American cheese he actually wrote it down on his cheese's to make lists well we all know that just because Gavin writes a cheese down doesn't mean we're going to see it in the near future but if you're watching this video that means he gave it a go I can't wait to see how it turns out back to you guys so thanks for that Larry yes I had said all those things and yes I stand by them but as I said the only thing that's foreign to this cheese making process or to make processed cheese or American cheese is a sodium citrate so I am using two of my own creations my Cheshire or Cheshire and I used blue Gelder for my cheese so let's go and check out how I made American cheese so the rest of the video will be in two parts the first part will be how to make sodium citrate but you can buy that in specialty stores so you can skip ahead if you want to - the cheese making part I'll put the timestamps below the first ingredient we're making we're using or measuring out is just water I'm using pure water 125 grams next ingredient I'm measuring out there is sodium bicarbonate or bicarbonate of soda so we're going to be measuring out ninety seven grams of bicarb I'm so close [Music] so these measurements have got to be a fairly exact and it's not that's the reason I'm not doing in them in pounds and ounces ounces is because I don't know how to convert them like that anyway so the next ingredient is citric acid and we need 74 grams of citric acid so this is anhydrous citric acid so it dissolves in water most of the citric acids you get in the store are and hydrous [Music] so there we go so the ingredients have to be exactly measured out for the chemical reaction to work properly so we put our citric acid into the into a sauce pans as a two litre saucepan we add in our water 125 milliliters or 125 grams which is exactly the same and we give that a good stir to make sure that the citric acid is fully dissolved in that in the water so you can't see any of the crystals remaining behind so that didn't take very long at all and now going to pour in the bicarb soda or sodium bicarbonate now technically what we're making oh look at that fizz it's a little big reaction there I had to keep stirring very fast to stop it from going over the side of the pan so just keep stirring after you put that in as you can see see there it's lessened a little bit the reaction does take quite some time now technically we're making trisodium citrate that's the proper technical chemical term for what we're trying to make there we go now it has settled down a fair bit you can see there that it's still bubbling it's still releasing carbon dioxide and that's exactly what we want it to do we want the complete reaction of the acid and the base to finish now it starts to go clear that just means some of the bicarb is settled on the bottom see they disturb a bit more so that the reaction continues and you get rid of all of that carbon dioxide out of the solution so you can see it goes fairly clear just giving it a final stir there with a spatula just to make sure there's no powders on the bottom and I've done that there so that's as clear as it's gonna get there's no more co2 being released it stopped fizzing and I've just about to turn the heat on where I have there so once all the co2 bubbles finish you turn the heat on just to a simmer and we're just going to boil the water off so the remaining powder or crystals that are left behind is the trisodium citrate or sodium citrate as you can see they gets a bit of a crust just give it a bit of a swirl now it took me about two hours to make this the biggest part of the reaction was when we added the bicarb and the citric acid together that's what took the longest this boiling off part took about 30 minutes tops so this was the fairly the easy part so I'm just stirring it just to make sure that it crystallizes properly which it does fairly fast once most of the water is gone you can see it starts to form a paste and that paste is the the sodium citrate so I'm just spreading that over the bottom of the pan it's on a very low heat at the moment just to make that dry out and it does and then when I got to this stage I just spread it out on the bottom and turn the heat off gave it a quick taste it tasted just slightly salty sour and then after a little bit more time it it turned into a powder that was had no water in it whatsoever so I just poured it into a little container and there's my sodium citrate easy peasy so all you have to do is pop a lid on airtight container and that will stay like that for ages so onto the cheese part making the American cheese I've got a big block of blue Gowda you can use any any melty sort of cheese so this is a big block let me see I think I've took measurements yes its 288 grams of the blue Ghouta and then I also great at 113 grams of Cheshire so the total amount of cheese you need is 400 grams so that's all grated you don't have to mix it or anything like that I'm just doing that to show you how finely grated it is so 400 grams of cheese so we've got another half cup of water we just pour that into our saucepan we add our sodium citrate to the water and we mix that so it becomes dissolved your second and - the heat on first there we go just on a very low heat so we just dissolved that just by whisking doesn't take very long took about a minute and then we start putting our handfuls of cheese in now the Cheshire Cheese as I mentioned it was very crumbly it wouldn't melt so in previous experiments so hopefully this will work here this would be good now notice the colour was a bit off because the Cheshire I was very white so I decided this stage to put in two drops of an art oh just two drops there we go and that gave it a little bit more colour a little bit more color that resembles American cheese or for me Kraft singles so you just keep stirring until it's smooth and oozy which is absolutely perfect now you could lessen the water a little bit I used a 25% water the amount of cheese that I had and that gave it a good consistency so you can actually pull this on nachos right now if you wanted to it will be absolutely perfect I chose to put it into moulds as you can see there just to give it some form now this is a rectangle six cavity food grade mold so I managed to get five good-sized cheese's out of it now from here on I popped it into the fridge just normal kitchen fridge for one hour just to firm up you can leave it longer it doesn't firm up anymore it just goes solid enough that you can use it so what does it smell like well it should smell like the resultant state of the two cheese's that I used the blue Gowda and the cheshire now the blue Couder as you may have seen shredded or or grated very easily however the cheshire was really really crumbly and it wouldn't have melted for love nor money so together into this emulsion state is quite remarkable the sodium citrate really does act as a very good emulsifier which prevents the cheese when it melts from splitting into the the oil that you'll see in oil and then the milk solids if you melt cheese normally you know so let's turn one out and and see what it looks like shall we for popping it out of the mold it seems to come out of its form okay let's have a look do we have a complete rectangle of cheese and we do look at that let's pop that aside one block of processed cheese just have a taste it shouldn't taste too much different than the other one that the ones that I made its yet not crumbly it feels like a Kraft single it's definitely processed cheese all right so let's have a taste I didn't add any salt to it during the process however the recipe I was using said you could add salt if you wanted to may have noticed that I put my finger into the molten cheese booze and tasted it and it was fairly salty already it's remarkable that tastes exactly like processed cheese well what we call it over here you can taste a little bit of the blue from the gara the blue gala that I made but seems to have gone nicely but definitely that is so much like craft process cheddar cheese from when I was a child it is just it's taken me right back crazy they're gonna be wrong it's quite nice very strong in flavor because the the blue cow tour was made in October 2018 so it's a fairly matured cheese and the Cheshire I wasn't too far after that so these are fairly mature cheeses that are basically been emulsified so they do taste very nice they're not bad it's just cheese melted down and return back to its solid state without a crumbling us really really nice I'll probably do this again actually if I had a cheese like Oh triple pepperjack which has turned so crumbly now as it's aged to get it into some sort of melty state that would be really good for say burgers or grilled cheese sandwiches then I could probably take it through this process I certainly made enough sodium citrate quite nice quite nice the sodium citrate had a slight saltiness to it being a salt and a sodium salt so I didn't really need to add any of the extra table salt or cheese so I definitely had to add the nos annatto because the cheshire that I had was really white and the gal de I don't think I added any colorant or anything to that so to get it to the state where it kind of looks like a yellow slab of processed cheese I had to add those two drops of annatto so just be aware you'll turn out with a lot whiter cheese if you don't add that on our toe so let's see how this goes in a grilled cheese sandwich shall we so is American cheese melty well from what I've seen yes it is and as if by magic Kim has made me this lovely toasted sandwich not a grilled cheese sandwich but a toasted sandwich I'm gonna see Hell melty this is you would get some indication though of course because I had to melt the cheese to put it into the mold to start with so yes I think it's going to be melting but let's have a look so there's a Oh Susie cheese look at that and Kim's put some red onion in the cheese sandwich so let's have a taste well that is lovely hmm perfect melty cheese mmm not the natural way but it'll do mmm beautiful taste to it [Music] well that'll do curd nerds as you've seen that's how you make American cheese beautiful toaster sandwich to go with it afterwards but I'll wrap that up in cling wrap and pop that in the fridge and we'll eat that over the next few months I think it'll be stay preserves they won't age due to the sodium citrate but it will stay the same exactly the same as it is right now a good cheese good experiment I did enjoy it and a great way to reprocess cheese if it's crumbly and not to the texture that you want it to and you want that flavor of the cheese you've created but you want to be able to melt it so try some sodium citrate it's harmless stuff it's in so many products that you don't even know check it out on Wikipedia well thank you for watching Kurd nerds and we'll see you next time

Channel: Gavin Webber

Views: 152,406

Rating: 4.8586926 out of 5

Keywords: American Cheese, processed cheese how it's made, Processed cheese, how to make american cheese, deep south texas, cheese making, homemade cheese, grilled cheese, how to make cheese, making cheese, gavin webber, cheese making at home, Sodium Citrate, melty cheese recipe, trisodium citrate cheese, melty cheese

Id: 4aGKiWQnMJc

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2019