Thursday, March 11, 2021

Tuesday's lunch

Chili dawgs with homemade Tex-Mex cheese sauce:

I had already cut into one dog with my fork before I realized I should have taken a picture.  Sorry about the fork wound.



3 comments:

John Mac said...

I rarely eat a chili dog, but damn, I'd go for those! How do you make "homemade Tex-Mex cheese"?

Kevin Kim said...

A basic cheese sauce starts with butter and flour to make a roux. Cook these together on medium heat until you have something like a paste. That's the roux.

Before the paste burns, add milk while stirring. Add the milk one "glug" at a time (yes, that's a unit of measurement in this context). After a while, you'll notice that your roux has turned into a Béchamel (basic white cream sauce). At this point, add your shredded cheese. (I had a bag of "Mexican mix" shredded cheese on hand, so I added a handful of that.) Stir until you get your cheese sauce. If too thick, add more milk. If too thin, add more cheese.

To make it vaguely Tex-Mex, add a teeny bit of garlic powder, then cayenne and cumin to taste.

When you add cheese to a Béchamel, you've technically got a sauce Mornay, but whatever you call it, it's cheese sauce. Recipes for cheese sauce are all over YouTube. For a beery variant, look up "Welsh rarebit" on my blog.

John Mac said...

Interesting. Never considered trying to make a cheese sauce before. Doesn't sound as difficult as I expected it would be.