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Again, that’s American cheese “food product”. That’s not American cheese.
… there’s no such thing as American cheese, then. American cheese is cheddar, Colby jack, and whatever else mild flavored cheese you want, melted in milk, and then reconstituted with sodium citrate. It’s “suspended cheese sauce”.
What are you talking about? Cheese made in America?
Technically Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler invented the first processed cheese in Switzerland in 1911 by heating cheese up and mixing in sodium citrate. Kraft patented the process in the USA in 1916. The term “American Cheese” was later coined to refer to any processed cheese.
The American Cheese Wikipedia page is poorly written with mostly redundant information from other Wikipedia pages… it’s just a commonly used word to refer to processed cheese and marketing term.
It’s full of emulsifiers and nearly flavorless so it can also make sauces super creamy
You can add sodium citrate and milk to just about any cheese to make it melt smoother if you want. Skip adding American entirely.
I can find american cheese a lot easier than I can find sodium citrate
True. But now you have options.
It also makes a really good grilled cheese
Yea, people try to get fancy with regular cheese on grilled cheese sandwiches and I hate it. Every one I’ve tried as soon as it cools off it gets weird and lumpy and gross. Kraft singles stay melty a lot better. Also great on egg sandwiches for the same reason. I do prefer regular cheeses on burgers though.
You can use fancier cheeses in a GC too, but you still need at least one slice of fake cheese for proper consistency. It’s the immulsifiers.
As an American, American “cheese” (including single slices, and things like spray cheese) fucking suck. Give me a good pepperjack or white cheddar on my burger, not that processed shit.
There’s so much inaccurate in this, I don’t even know where to start. I’ll try and find the comment I made the last time this all came up, and either link or copy it here, but it was months ago, so I have no clue if I’ll find it.
The short version is that “American cheese” is cheese, just processed with an emulsifier to make it more stable and melt easier.
The process wasn’t german in origin, it was swiss, and even that isn’t fully accurate since the process used to make the original processed cheese in the US was slightly different.
And, if you read your packages in the US, where the terminology on packaging is legally defined and limited for cheese, you can tell whether or not it has any cheese in it by the terms used.
That’s the short version, and unless I find my previous mini essay, that’s all the work I’m willing to do this time around, but all of this is verifiable online if anyone wants to write up their own essay on the subject
Edit: holy shit, I actually found it quick! https://sh.itjust.works/comment/8390398
The swiss are just mountain germans.
I can’t deny this :)
That’s not American cheese.
That’s the kraft “cheese food product”.
American cheese is essentially Swiss that hasn’t aged.
Edit: looks like they’ve changed the label, but it still says “cheese product”, so NOT cheese, kraft even admits it.
Swiss that hasn’t aged
But “Swiss cheese” isn’t a thing in itself either. The term is used solely in the US.
Switzerland has all kinds of very different kinds of cheese. Aged and young ones.
The hamburger did not originate in Germany, despite its name. While the exact origins are debated, it is pretty well agreed that it was created in the US sometimes in the late 19th to early 20th century.
The closest connection to germany that some try to make is an entirely different dish that uses ground beef or pork, which is such a loose connection that you might as well say it originated in Egypt as they were the first civilization to make bread.
The problem is that the origin is “hamburger
beefsteak” which is the beef patty that came from Germany. This was combined with a sandwich to create a “hamburger sandwich”. Over time, the sandwich part was dropped and now here we are.It wasn’t even really a patty as we know it in burgers, it was more like a slice of breakfast sausage.
I’d argue if you put breakfast sausage on a bun it adequately fits the definition of a burger.
I wouldn’t call a slice of sausage a patty, so I disagree
I cannot tell you why, though, and I make my own sausages and burgers by hand so like, I should know why?
