• Pipoca@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      American cheese isn’t made of plastic in the sense of polymers, it is plastic in the sense of being easily deformed or molded.

      At its most basic, American cheese is literally just cheese, water and sodium phosphate. It’s “not cheese”, but in the sense that meatloaf isn’t meat and mayonnaise isn’t eggs.

        • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          American cheese is not a fancy cheese, yeah. It also isn’t great cold.

          It is a pretty decent cheese sauce, though. It doesn’t taste starchy, with a muted cheese flavor like mornay does. If you put extra sharp cheddar or smoked gouda in homemade mornay or homemade American, the homemade American will be noticeably cheesier. Having made homemade mac and cheese a number of ways, I strongly prefer homemade American to any of the other recipes I know.

          I only really eat store-bought American melted, such as on eggs in a breakfast sandwich, on a burger or grilled cheese.

          Also, there’s plenty of decent American cheeses, like Humboldt fog, Maytag blue, or rogue river blue. American cheese is called that, but it doesn’t define American cheese making.

    • kase@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Man I don’t even wanna know what’s in the powdered cheese you get in a macaroni box. (I don’t eat any cheese cause I’m lactose intolerant, but I always see people just toss the cheese pouch and use their own cheese.)

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s powdered cheese sauce.

        It’s mostly made using spray dryers. Basically, a spray dryer uses hot air to quickly dry a fine mist of something. It’s how they make milk powder and egg powder as well.