I'm trying to make some nacho cheese sauce. As the recipe calls for milk, I think the overall cheese flavor is getting diluted. I'd like to make my cheese sauce taste really cheesy. I'm going to try using an aged, very sharp cheddar cheese in my next experiment — hoping that it'll still taste cheesy after it gets diluted by the milk.
Are there any other things I might be able to do (e.g. additional ingredients) that might improve the overall cheese flavor?
Best Answer
The first way to boost the cheese flavor in any cheese sauce is by adding salt. In Mac + Cheese, authors Allison Arevalo and Erin Wade give the following tip:
Another way to boost the savoriness of a cheese sauce is to add blanched or sweated onion puree before adding the cheese. Many nacho cheese sauces start out with a bare-bones Bechamel, leaving out the onion and veal fat found in the richest Classic Bechamel recipes. Adding sweated onion puree and cheese to a bare-bone Bechamel you end up with something richer and more savory. This is the approach to cheese sauce that Michael Ruhlman suggests as a base for cheese souffle and mac and cheese in his book Ruhlman's 20.
Using aged cheeses can add a ton a flavor, but don't bother using anything too expensive some of the more pungent, barnyard flavors in cheeses like English Farmstead Cheddars can become too aggressive in a cheese sauce. As others have mentioned some aged cheeses are dry and can lead to seizing if not balanced with other ingredients which help to reduce seizing. One way to avoid seizing when using dry or aged cheeses is to make at least 20% (by weight) of the cheeses you use process cheese like American or cream cheese.
The more "modernist" method of getting aged cheese flavor in a cheese sauce relies on the use of so-called melting salts such as, Sodium citrate and Sodium hexametaphosphate. These ingredients resist seizing and are used in lieu of a butter/flour roux in cheese sauces.