Smoked Queso with Real Cheese

[Smoked Transistors]

Watched a newly released Chuds BBQ YouTube video yesterday of him smoking real cheese for Brisket Smoked Mac And Cheese. Looked fantastic.

[texastweeter]

Sodium citrate is the secret ingredient to make it smooth. I would worry about using potassium citrate, too much could be bad from what I hear.

[Huskee]

Thank you, this looks great! I love American cheese but I am not a Velveeta fan, it is different in a slimier, runnier, worse way IMO.

[HotSun]

JoeSousa , thanks for sharing this recipe, I will definitely give this a try. I am wondering if potassium citrate would work in place of sodium citrate, since they are often used together or interchangeably for buffering acidic solutions like soft drinks.

[HotSun]

Haha, cheese food. Yeah, I like McRib, too, sad to say.

[klflowers]

Bkhuna that is so wrong lol

[Bkhuna]

Velveeta is to cheese what Rosie O'Donnell is to woman.

[klflowers]

My wife loves Velveeta so we always have a big block of it in the fridge. Since I am not sure what cheese food is, I tend to avoid it. Of course, I like a good McRib, so who am I to criticize Velveeta...

[bbqLuv]

Real Cheese . . . must be up grade from Velveeta.

[58limited]

Took the lazy way out and added a block of EasyMelt (HEB's store version of American Cheese) and it cut the salt enough for me - I know that defeats the purpose of using real cheese but this has over 1000gm real cheese in it so I'm happy and it is good. I also added an extra can of Rotels but ended up adding some milk because it was too thick: chips kept breaking. Ended up with 4 quarts for the freezer which is great, pre-made dip for holiday gatherings. Thanks for posting this recipe!

[rickgregory]

It turns out there's another ingredient to add if you want it to firm up more: https://blog.modernistpantry.com/wtf...metaphosphate/

That's about a 12 minute video but the upshot is that you want to use about 3% (by cheese weight) of sodium citrate and about 0.1% of the sodium hex. The latter produces a firmer finished product so you would NOT use it for a queso.

[texastweeter]

Refrigerate and use a delislicer

[JCGrill]

Google making cheese slices or Velveeta. It's just a matter of getting the ratio right. Here's a site I reference frequently.

https://www.amazingfoodmadeeasy.com/info/modernist-ingredients/more/sodium-citrate

[58limited]

Adding tasso probably didn't help things in the salt department. Simple fix, I'll add more cheese.

[Bkhuna]

Using cheese instead of (cant bring myself to mention the V word) is a game changer.