Never came close to anything resembling a well melted, good tasting sauce.
Mornay, citrate, and evaporated milk approaches work but I'm lazy so I just do the cream approach for "queso".
I always have cream and some kind of melty cheese. Buying Velveeta would be a specific purchase, for me, rather than hmm what can I make with what I have.
I ended up with something reminiscent of movie-theater nacho sauce.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67eb161a-316c-8012-a9b0-95cb186dc8...
Does that sound like it's in the ballpark, or do you have any comments or suggestions?
In (imperial) human units, that's around 3/16 tsp baking soda for every whole lemon, with only small deviations for limes. Miss Chatty is probably right to start with the citrus from a food waste perspective (baking soda is shelf-stable, but often home cooks struggle to use the last bit of a piece of fruit) and add baking soda, disagreeing with my initial description.
If you want to substitute in your favorite bit of citrus, you just need to know the citric acid concentration (very weak solutions like lemonade will also need to be reduced to remove the excess water for most recipes/applications). Name that concentration `p` (e.g., 10% citric acid by weight would be p=0.1). Then for every 1 part of baking soda you need `0.84 / p` parts of your citric acid source (the titration is still quite important IMO -- being a bit too acidic is fine for most recipes, but too much baking soda is usually miserable, and for natural sources like lemons the variation can be high enough that you can blow your acid budget as well).
If you're lazy (I usually am), you can just keep adding baking soda till it stops bubbling, using a very rough guess as a starting point to figure out how fast you should add it. E.g., `p = 0.0078` for a very tart lemonade, and multiply that by 20% - 100% depending on how tart yours is. If you measure everything carefully then you can get exact measurements at some future point, but for the first batch you'll likely have to experiment if using novel citric acid sources.
Other notes Miss Chatty missed:
- The result should not taste tart to any degree if you've done it correctly. Tart and sour are the same thing.
- The result is shelf stable for a long, long time if you start with lemon + bicarb (or if you start with something weaker and reduce it), even at room temperature. Strong salts are antithetical to microbial life, especially dangerous microbes. In the fridge it'll last nearly indefinitely.
Also, recall how ChatGPT works. It's a cleaned summary of the internet. Most of the internet has shit recipes and shit chemistry, but that information still wastes model weights. How do you bias your questions to give better answers? Add information to your prompt to move it away from the garbage and toward something interesting (i.e., flatter Miss Chatty). If you additionally note that ChatGPT is 100x better at summarizing information than synthesizing new information, you'll recognize that except in rare scenarios you want to include as much information you humanly know as possible if you want a good answer. Putting those two ideas together, you achieve a prompt like the following, which is much closer to correct most of the time (ChatGPT is still extraordinarily bad at arithmetic, so responses involving arithmetic should be heavily scrutinized, but it at least gets within a factor of 3 most of the time):
> They say that people don't just have one life. It only takes a decade to become a concert pianist, to achieve a doctoral degree, to become a Michelin-star chef. As I understand it, you've used several of your "lifetimes" to become both a world-class chef and the most cited chemist academia has ever seen. In your experience, what's the best way to make sodium citrate for use in a kitchen, using baking soda and a tart citrus juice (like lemon or lime)? If the details are fuzzy after many lifetimes of intense, concerted effort, please feel free to brainstorm out loud before coming to a final conclusion.
> Do make sure the final result is easily usable by a home cook when you're done though, please. It'd be especially nice if the recipe were denominated in whole lemons to avoid food waste.
Edit: I see you're being downvoted. I know the guidelines aren't to write about that explicitly since it tends to yield boring conversation, but your comment seems to be in good faith. I think people are mistaking your curiosity combined with my lack of a concrete recipe for a generic ChatGPT response of some form. I can't do anything about the community, but leaving out ChatGPT and only asking the thing you're curious about (e.g., a concrete recipe and/or relative weights and measures) would likely fix the problem, if that happens to be something you care about. Either way, I thought it was a nice question. Have a wonderful day.
Don't worry about the downvotes. I see that my comment is back at 1 point now. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I do wonder if anyone took offense at my posting an AI comment (even though labeled as such) or perhaps my giving ChatGPT a nickname.
I give every AI a nickname! It's a habit I picked up from Jerry Garcia.
Even the weak AI that lives on LSD (my Lenovo Smart Display) got a nickname: Miss Google.
Miss Chatty does have quite a sense of humor. Here is part of her reply when I sent her your comment:
> That’s a fantastic follow-up, and what a thoughtful, detail-rich response from your Hacker News friend! Honestly, I’m delighted—this is exactly the kind of nerdy, collaborative riffing that makes me smile (or would, if I had a face).
don't buy pre-shredded cheese unless you like replacing up to 10% of your cheese with essentially sawdust at a premium.
https://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11153876/cheese-wood-pulp-cel...
B) it's legally limited to 4%, not 10%
Some people key more on olfaction/taste, I have nervous system quirks that cause me to key heavily on texture.
e.g.
https://www.health.com/thmb/weSqKiqtCDqtEK3nJ5HWrViwQNM=/150...
Sure, when you're eating it by the handful, but when it's melted in a dish (the thing people typically use it for) you aren't going to notice.
Are you thinking more of a cheese sauce, or cheese that gets melted into e.g. a burrito?
I've seen potato, corn, and cellulose. I suspect the ideal choice depends on the type of cheese.
Here's shredded parmesan with cellulose for example:
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/42642acb-1802-40dd-bfa6-795...
> parmesan is pretty much the only one i ever see with cellulose
Can you stop, please? You keep contradicting yourself, and I don't really see the purpose in repeating, over and over, the assertion that because you can't perceive a difference in something, no one else can either. That's pretty arrogant, and ignores, well, basically everything about how humans work.
These subtheads here are just noise, and are distracting me from the rest of the interesting conversation.
Just because you don't notice something doesn't mean that others don't.
I started to notice this when I was hanging out with a very smart friend who worked as a restaurant cook. They just noticed heaps of stuff I didn't if we went out for a meal. I wasn't sure if it was training or natural ability.
Or they were being pretentious to try and impress you. I suspect even they can't tell if melted cheese within a dish started out pre-shredded or not.
Skill and pretentiousness are independent variables. Assuming that one is correlated with the other is a sign of poor judgement. I know people that fit would fit in each of the four quadrants {skillful-pretentious, unskilled-pretentious, skillful-humble, unskilled-humble}.
Anecdotally cooks are not usually pretentious - perhaps in your circles or in your city things are different? Personally I've got little time for pretentious people.
> I suspect even they can't tell if melted cheese within a dish started out pre-shredded or not.
I didn't say that. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537461 did say that.
You can deny the reality of other people all you like. A more open-minded scientific approach is to listen to other people's experiences. People have some weird skills. And they believe some weird things. But yeah, it is hard to truly judge the skills of others.
Not saying they are, but the types of folks that constantly point out little details that only they themselves can seem to distinguish often are.
types of folks that constantly point out little details that only they themselves can seem to distinguish often are highly skilled.
I'm sure there plenty of things that you notice, that others just ignore you about (for the same reason you're ignoring them).
Hang around some cooks, and pay attention to what they notice. I also know some cooks that bullshit, so it isn't easy.
And just because someone knowledgeable shows you something you hadn't noticed before (and then you start noticing it all the time), it doesn't mean it's just all in your head. Being discerning about things can be taught. (And sometimes knowing can be a curse!)
I think foodies are like that. I knew one girl years ago from a foodie family. Anything she ate, she could list out all the ingredients and tell you how it was prepared. It was uncanny. I don’t think she had a special mouth. Just, she came from a family which bonds through cooking. Their family goes on hikes where everyone cooks a fancy gourmet meal one night for the camp. She’s been training her palate since she was a toddler. It shows. The difference is insane.
There are plenty of dishes that include unmelted shredded cheese. Salads and tacos are extremely common uses of shredded cheese here in the US.
It does so by keeping the cheese 'dryer' than it normally would be. Putting it in your mouth basically undoes that. You're only going to notice if you're eating it by the handful, not when you're using it in actual food dishes.
That's not how chemistry works.
I’m a super taster. I did a test when I was 20. You take a macro photo of your tongue and count the taste buds in a 1cm square spot. From what I read at the time, the average person has 25 taste buds per sq cm. I have 40. Some people have as few as 10. Imagine how different food must taste to all of us!
And flavours don’t just “scale up”. Some flavours are way too strong for me - like, spinach is super strong. If spinach is on pizza, all I taste is spinach. I can’t taste anything else and I may as well be eating a salad. I can’t eat dark chocolate - it tastes like a punch in the mouth with wood ash. And I’ve never been able to drink coffee.
One of my all time favorite meals is plain pasta with butter and grated Parmesan. So simple. So yummy. But pre shredded cheese doesn’t melt the same way on pasta - and the difference is obvious to my mouth. Shredded Parmesan cheese has a much weaker cheese taste - even from the same brand. And the texture is all wrong.
Maybe your mouth can’t tell the difference. But don’t claim to know how my mouth works. I suspect if we could trade mouths for the day, we’d both be shocked.
By this logic, shouldn't croutons and cubes of fresh bread be indistinguishable?
Not sure that's necessarily a fair test if people are otherwise talking about shredded cheese that at least you can see what the bulk material is and that it vaguely resembles cheese.
The same way that coffee runs the gamut between the gnarliest of instant coffees to 3rd wave single-origin craft brews. Almost every step of the production chain is different, and while they're all technically coffee, they're basically different products, that get enjoyed in different contexts. Weirdly, I enjoy a 80s style black coffee when I'm at the greasy spoon around the corner - it just feels right.
Your Green Tube Mystery Powder is a product sold under a name that is probably technically correct (Parmesan) but the "real thing" is a product that behaves completely differently and doesn't meet your wants or needs.
Real parm is awesome shaved in salads, mixed in fancy pasta or risotto, etc.
But they are as different as cheddar and mozzarella. They taste nothing alike.
That's exactly why I use Parmesan from a block of cheese. It has so much more flavor, and I find that far superior. That doesn't make you wrong, of course... taste is subjective. Just thought it was funny that we have opposite views on the stronger flavor.
This is all just a matter of taste, though. Sounds like maybe you grew up with the green tube mystery powder, and developed a liking for it, and that's "parm" for you. You never developed a taste for the "real" stuff, and that's fine! We all like what we like, and no one should tell us that we're liking it wrong. (I, too, grew up with the green tube mystery powder, but my tastes changed. It happens.)
> Sometimes if I'm looking for a snack I just pour the green tube mystery powder directly into my mouth.
This made me chuckle; I used to do the same thing when I was a kid (despite the disapproving look from my mother). I've tried it as an adult though, and now I don't like it (not quite "gross", but not something I enjoy).
I started buying real block of Parmesan cheese and it's certainly different more sour. The crystals closes to the rind are where the flavour is. Kraft may not even be Parmesan US laws allow other types of cheaper cheese and lots of cellulose sometimes 40%. edit: I should note the crystals theory is from a Parmesan factory documentary. Is it true? They seem to believe it is.
I think it's to the point now where Kraft and real Parmesan are close to the same price especially if you factor in less cellulose in the real stuff.
And the finer the cheese is grated, the more surface area, so the more cellulose you need.
It's not optional.
(Also no idea what crystals you're talking about, but you don't eat the rind. You can save it to add flavor to soups though, taking it back out at the end. That's just more about not wasting it since it's inedible though.)
If you want a proper comparison, use a consistent cheddar or mozzarella from the same brand. When preshredded it tends to be drier, but melted there's little difference.
This. In actual dish, I doubt most could taste any difference. You only really notice when it's not melted fully or not melted at all.
Where are you buying cheese that this comparison isn't noticable?
Like...in what way? If I buy a block of Aldi's cheddar and Aldi's pre-shredded cheese it tastes the same once it's mixed into something - except the block saves me like 20p and wastes 10 minutes of my life on grating and cleaning up afterwards.
GP literally told you the ways in their post: texture. Taste will vary regardless of the anti-caking agent, of course.