At dinner recently, a friend made the unmistakable face of disgust of someone who inherently hates American cheese when the topic crossed our table. She looked at me as if to say, “how could someone who has spent so much of their life cooking think American cheese was good?” For me it is the pinnacle of melting cheeses, and it is the only cheese I want on a cheeseburger. There’s certainly a time and place for your highbrow cheeses, but, for me, it is never on a burger. Let me explain.
Melted cheese is what unites the bun to the toppings, and to the patty. Without it you have a bun sitting on top of veggies, sitting on top of slices of un-melted cheese, sitting on a beef patty, sitting on a bun. Essentially, individual ingredients alone on a plate. With melted cheese you have one perfectly prepared plate of food with ingredients meant to be eaten together in one singular bite- as any refined chef would want their plate of food to be eaten. Herein lies the rub. For me a cheeseburger should always be a fattier blend of chuck, 75/25, and it should be a thin patty seasoned well and seared hard on a flat top in its own fat, and it should always be cooked medium rare which means it’s going to cook fast. Too fast to properly melt a cheese and control the internal temperature of your beef . . . but the cheese must be melted! To that end there is only one cheese- the king of cheeseburger cheese- the gooiest, the stickiest, and creamiest melting cheese of all- American cheese.
“It’s not even a cheese,” my friend said, “It says right on the package ‘processed cheese.’” So, then what is it? Why is it so polarizing? Why does being processed mean it’s not a cheese? Simply put, it doesn’t.
We are inundated with regulatory bodies in our lives that classify everything. The words they choose become part of our food language and we understand them to be inherently positive or negative, and we apply these feelings to words even though they don’t tell the entire truth. For example, if something is organic it’s healthy, right? Maybe, and often yes, but what it really means is that “they contain at least 70% organically produced ingredients,” and “the remaining non-organic ingredients are produced without using prohibited practices.”[1] As the consumer we know that products labeled organic generally cost more than products that are not, but does that always mean they’re healthy and worth the extra money? As a manufacturer if I can prove that my product meets the USDA specifications, and I can label it organic, then I can charge more for it. Did you know that your favorite sports drink named after the Everglades’s most famous swamp reptile make an organic version? Does that make it healthy? Or does that mean they have proven they don’t add pesticides to their sugar drink that was never grown in a field to begin with, and have also met all the regulations set forth by the governing body so they can label it organic? It is up to us as consumers to wade through the boggy marshland of food regulated terminology and decide for ourselves.
So, then it begs the question, what are processed foods? Does being processed mean it’s bad? Does it mean it’s fake? A process is “a series of actions or operations conducing to an end[;] a continuous operation or treatment especially in manufacture.”[2] To that end, virtually all the food you eat is processed in some way. The life cycle of food is a natural process and as soon as a fruit is picked, it’s on the clock to end up in your grocery cart. That means most of the produce you purchase will have undergone several processes to help preserve it before it reaches you. That doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. Chocolate, jellies and jams, frozen vegetables, yogurt, almond milk, pickles, and beer, just to name a few, are some other processed foods you’ve probably eaten in your life without applying a negative stigma.
Similarly, all the cheese you’ve eaten in your life was processed. After all, cheesemaking is a process, but most cheeses don’t illicit the polarizing opinions American cheese does. Why? What we consider “real” cheese undergoes “six important steps: acidification, coagulation, separating curds and whey, salting, shaping, and ripening,”[3] and American cheese does not. American cheese is made by processing an already made cheese, generally Colby, or a combination of cheese into what we know as American cheese, but that doesn’t make it any less of a cheese. As chefs we manipulate food all the time to turn it into something different, and it’s often done to showcase an ingredient in a different or unexpected way. It is never to diminish the food. Molecular gastronomy is an entire field of food science that chefs use to manipulate food using physical and chemical processes which are often celebrated. I would argue that American cheese is, in fact, one of the best examples of molecular gastronomy and should be honored as such as long as you, the consumer, understand what you’re buying. That brings us back to that pesky food language we love.
The FDA has three classifications of processed cheese which are sneakily similar, and you should know the difference. They are pasteurized process cheese, pasteurized process cheese food, and pasteurized process cheese product. As you can see if you were shopping without a keen eye, you could easily mistake one for the other. Pasteurized process cheese is made with one-hundred percent real cheese, pasteurized process cheese food is made with fifty-one percent or more real cheese, and pasteurized process cheese product is made with less than fifty-one percent. So, there’s your guide, but if you’re buying the real thing then it is, in fact, a real cheese made from another real cheese. Is bacon any less pork belly because it has been cured? I would argue it is more, and so is American cheese. After all, when was the last time you ordered Colby cheese by itself without needing a little Jack?
[1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/03/22/organic-101-what-usda-organic-label-means
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/process
[3] https://www.thespruceeats.com/important-steps-in-cheesemaking-591566#:~:text=There%20are%20six%20important%20steps,salting%2C%20shaping%2C%20and%20ripening.