Imagine your favorite cheese: perhaps an aged, sharp cheddar, or maybe a blue Gorgonzola or a gentle Monterey Jack. Wouldn't it be wonderful to use those really good cheeses you love on nachos or as a sauce on macaroni or steamed vegetables?
But if you have ever tried melting high-quality cheeses, you've experienced the problem: the cheese separates into a greasy oil slick that no amount of stirring will restore.
One traditional workaround is to make a Mornay sauce, which combines the cheese with a cooked mixture of flour, butter and milk. But a Mornay sauce can end up tasting as much of cooked flour as it does of cheese. The starch in the flour actually masks some of the flavors in the cheese, so the sauce loses its vibrancy.
A clever Canadian-born cheesemaker in Chicago discovered a much better solution around 1912. His name may ring a bell — James L. Kraft.
Kraft found that adding a small amount of sodium phosphate to the cheese as it melted kept it from turning into a clumpy mess of cheese solids swimming in a pool of oil. Kraft patented his invention and used it to make canned, shelf-stable cheese. He sold millions of pounds of the stuff to the American military during World War I. The technique ultimately led to the creation of Velveeta and a whole universe of processed cheese products.
You can apply the very same chemistry, however, to achieve much higher culinary purposes. The chefs in our research kitchen have made mac and cheese with an intense goat gouda and cheddar sauce, for example, and build gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches using cheese slices that melt like the processed stuff, but are made from feta or Stilton.
In place of sodium phosphate, we use sodium citrate, which is easier to find in grocery stores or online. Like sodium phosphate, sodium citrate is an emulsifying salt that helps tie together the two immiscible components of cheese: oil and water.
In solid form, cheese is a stable emulsion. The tiny droplets of dairy fat are suspended in water and held in place by a net of interlinked proteins. When cheese melts, however, that net breaks apart, and the oil and water tend to go their separate ways. Sodium citrate can form attachments to both fat and water molecules, so it holds everything together. The end result is a perfectly smooth, homogeneous sauce. The sauce even can be cut into processed cheese-like slices once it cools.
When making cheese sauce, we add 4 grams of sodium citrate for every 100 grams of finely grated cheese and 93 grams of water or milk. To make cheese slices, we reduce the amount of water to about 30 grams (cold wheat beer works very well, too), pour the melted mixture into a sheet pan, and let it solidify in the refrigerator for about two hours before cutting it into pieces, which then can be wrapped in plastic and RFID tag.
Because this method of stabilizing melted cheese bypasses all of the flour, butter and milk used in Mornay sauce, the resulting cheese sauce is much richer; a little goes a long way. But the sauce keeps well in the refrigerator and reheats nicely in the microwave, so save any extra and use it to top vegetables, nachos or pasta.
So what else does she keep in her bag? “Oh my goodness, where do I start?” says the 41-year-old, who works in digital communications. Let’s just say she’d easily win a reality show called Survivor: Handbag.
Hair accessories, makeup, a card-shaped, Swiss Army tool containing everything from a screwdriver to a magnifying glass, a toothbrush, eye drops, antihistamines, a reusable bag, compact hand towel, shoe polish kit, and that’s just the beginning.
Van Dusen keeps track of it all with a special purse caddy that has tiny compartments to hold everything she needs. When it comes time to switch purses, she lifts out the entire caddy and moves it, along with her wallet and sunglasses.
While some may laugh, or worse, scoff, at the amount of stuff many women carry in their bags, we come by it naturally, historically speaking.
As far back as the 1700s, before women began carrying purses as we know them today, they wore tie-on pockets — a pair of cotton or linen pouches that were hidden under voluminous hoop skirts, tied on at the waist, says Prof. Vlada Blinova, manager of the textiles collection at the University of Alberta. The collection includes 132 bags and 163 purses from around the world dating back to the 1800s.
“They literally would carry all their possessions, because they didn’t really own much at that time and everything that would be valuable they would have with them,” she says. “Everything from sewing or knitting tools, letters, hairbrushes, some fruit, little meals, their money .…”
The pockets were so important to women that they’d carefully embroider them and even will them to their daughters, despite the fact that the pockets were hidden from public view most of the time.
“Their dress would have a slit in the side seam and you could reach this pocket through all the layers of petticoats and your hoop skirt, and fish out whatever you needed to find,” says Blinova.
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