Sous Vide cheese sauce

I’m still on my quest for homemade cheese fries, and this time I pretty much got the result I wanted. Believe it or not, making cheese sauce is the most difficult part. I have previously tried the Bechamel method but never got satisfactory results. I guess it takes quite a bit of practice to arrive at the right consistency.

You might be wondering how commercial cheese sauce is made. You guessed it – special chemicals. It may sound scary, but Sodium Citrate and Sodium Hexametaphosphate are very already very commonly found in everyday food items. When you use these, as detailed in the recipe from Chefsteps, you are pretty much guaranteed to get results like that of commercial cheese sauce. The advantage of making your own cheese sauce from scratch is that you know exactly what went into making it. The other advantage of doing it yourself, in this part of the world (Singapore and Asia in general) is that off the shelf commercial cheese sauce is almost non-existent, or are sold at hefty prices, and making it yourself is often a good choice.

Instead of measuring accurately, i just guesstimated the quantity of the ingredients. I didn’t grate the chesse and ended up with slightly lumpy cheese sauce, but otherwise, it was great.

By the way, i bought Sodium Citrate and Sodium Hexametaphosphate from modernistpantry and shipped them to Singapore via ezbuy. As a first time customer, you get free domestic shipping (i.e. within the US) with the promo code ‘shipfree’.

Just for comparison, here’s the bechamel version, which is visibly lumpy.