Cheese Sauce – Cheddar Sauce Recipe
A bit of thrill or something to take a notch higher a meal? Check out this Cheese sauce recipe that transcends our body into a new zeal!
Good things come in small packages and they do it for a reason. Our body was used to accommodate such inconveniece, work with them then evolve around them.
Unfortunately, along the way, we’ve become a bit too clever for our own good.
Sure, it took a couple of thousands years to figure out the underlying chemical process of why something tastes good but we’ve nailed it eventually.
Our body’s millions of years old happiness reward system that uses dopamine to convince us to work our way through nests of bees for a bit of pleasure can get us hooked on things quite easily.
More we get, the more dopamine will be released, thing got us addicted to anything from gambling through sports to sugar.
Most of the high energy things in nature are locked away and resourcing them required considerable effort so it’s understandable that our body needed some motivation to work for them instead of just munching on some dry leaves like sloths.
These dopamine shots that we get when something highly rewarding happens to our brain, turned out to be so effective that we grew a bigger brain just to figure out how to get them more easily.
First came farming then industrialization after that refining and finally processing food into an easily digestible, hence highly rewarding state that makes us want more of it after each bite.
The problem is that we no longer need to work for them physically so we could use up the energy we consume, neither our body can cope with the amount of highly processed food but no one briefed our primitive brain, that is responsible for keeping us alive on a daily basis, about these things .
Apparently, we can’t switch our obsolete system to the requirements of the new world at will. At least not without the expense of great effort and a series of conscious decisions, like the ones we make when deliberately not tasting cheese sauce while making it.
Cheese sauce or as originally known as cheddar sauce or in places with cooking heritage Mornay sauce, is one of the main pillar of British cuisine, given, of course, that such thing exists.
Cheese sauce is based on Béchamel sauce which is known simply as “white sauce” in circles, less familiar with French or in fact any cooking at all.
Béchamel sauce is made by making roux first, mixing equal parts of flour and fat (such as butter or cooking oil) together then cooked until the desired color is achieved. In the case of Béchamel, a white roux is the optimal choice which is then diluted with milk and cooked until the desired consistency is achieved.
Cheese sauce can be used for a variety of dishes from main meals through dips for snacks to eating it on its own in the secrecy of the darkest corner of our kitchen. Sure if we live alone hiding is not necessary nor pretending that we are only tasting the sauce but it won’t save our waistline from noticing our binging sessions on cheese sauce.
Choosing skimmed milk or going thin with the sauce by thrifting out the roux may knock a couple of calories off here and there, but if we don’t watch out the amount of cheesiness we drizzle on our plates, the fat in the best cheddar cheese will require much more Jumping Jacks from us than we’ll be able to do in a day.
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons / 50g Butter
- 4 tablespoons / 50g Flour
- 2 cups / 500g Milk
- 1 cup / 100g Aged cheddar cheese (grated)
- Optional
- ½ teaspoon / 3g Salt
- ¼ teaspoon / 1g Mustard seed (optional)
- ⅛ teaspoon / 0.7g Black pepper (ground)
How to make Cheese sauce
- Melt butter on medium to high heat.
- Mix in the flour. We’ve just made roux, we don’t need to brown it though, so quickly get to the next step.
- Pour in the milk. Cold milk help dissolving the flour. Alternatively, we can just mix the cold milk with the flour and butter then start heating it but that wouldn’t be technically correct.
- Whisk vigorously until there are no lumps remain. We’ve just made Béchamel sauce.
- Add the grated cheese and any other additional ingredients.
- Mix the cheese well with the Béchamel sauce and Mornay sauce is done. It will get thicker as it cools. Add more milk when reheated for a thinner sauce if desired.
Enjoy!
Cheese Sauce - Cheddar Sauce Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons Butter
- 4 tablespoons Flour
- 2 cups Milk
- 1 cup Aged cheddar cheese grated
- Optional
- ½ teaspoon Salt
- ¼ teaspoon Mustard seed optional
- ⅛ teaspoon Black pepper ground
Instructions
- Melt butter on medium to high heat.
- Mix in the flour. We've just made roux, we don't need to brown it though, so quickly get to the next step.
- Pour in the milk. Cold milk help dissolving the flour. Alternatively, we can just mix the cold milk with the flour and butter then start heating it but that wouldn't be technically correct.
- Whisk vigorously until there are no lumps remain. We've just made Béchamel sauce.
- Add the grated cheese and any other additional ingredients.
- Mix the cheese well with the Béchamel sauce and Mornay sauce is done. It will get thicker as it cools. Add more milk when reheated for a thinner sauce if desired.
Notes
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