True, clean and fresh ingredients will always make the best sauces—fresh full-fat cream, butter, aromatics and, of course, the best cheeses. Some great cheese obviously should be eaten alone, yet when combined with other proper and beneficial ingredients, will make a superb sauce. A perfect cheese sauce should not hide, but rather carry and promote the flavors of the cheese being represented and the main component. For example, a great Alfredo sauce should be very simple with just a few fresh, high-quality ingredients—fresh cream, Parmesan, butter, garlic. Simple variations on Alfredo might involve accents via finishing cheeses, like Romano or Asiago, or adding roasted garlic.
When creating cheese and dairy sauces, factors to keep in mind are: type of cheese, application, flavor building blocks of the dish, functional components of the dish, mouthfeel, dairy notes, cooked dairy, creaminess, fat, richness, and subtle flavors of the cheese itself. A perfect cheese sauce should, ideally, have a consistency slightly thicker than reduced cream. Again, this depends on the end application. The sauce should also have good color and sheen. Obviously, the cheeses used will impact some of the color, such as when work-ing with colored-Cheddar sauces.
A thinner sauce might be called for in cases where it needs to go through an additional cooking step, say into a baked pasta where the starches from the pasta and the additional cooking will reduce the sauce to the correct consistency and body. Similarly, some cheese-sauce applications contain starch systems that hydrate when heated and are intentionally left thinner when cold—for example, pasta dishes designed for end-user baking or microwaving. The thinner body allows the sauce to fully coat and mix with pasta without addi-tional mixing or stirring. Also, if added to a sauté application, the sauce needs to be slightly thinner beforehand to cook down to the cor-rect consistency.
Choosing the right cheese
The different ingredients and processes used when making, maturing and processing a cheese result in a variety of cheeses that function differently in prepared foods and sauces. Each cheese has a distinct texture and flavor profile that directly translates into the cheese sauce.
All cheeses do not act the same when cooked. Natural cheese can vary in moisture content, flavor, age, color, texture, acidity and many other factors, and different types of cheese perform different functions in sauce applications. To understand this, one needs to understand the makeup of the cheese and its other sauce components.
Managing the quantity and quality of protein in a cheese sauce is very influential in achieving the desired viscosity. As cheese ages, fats and proteins break down into shorter units that increase the flavor profile. Consequently, aged cheese has less of an ability to blend into a smooth, stable emulsion, and could result in a thinner sauce with a grainy, or “curdy,” texture and less cling. Most often, a blend of cheeses and/or cheese ages will help control viscosity and achieve flavor balance. Combining younger cheeses with aged cheeses achieves the desired creamy consistency along with the stronger impact of the sharper, aged cheeses. When cost is a factor, hard or aged cheeses, with their sharper flavors, can add a lot of flavor without using a large quantity of cheese. The body and volume of a sauce can be increased with water along with other dairy solids, whey proteins and/or dry milk powders. They can also be tightened with starch systems.
Scaling up
The techniques for making good cheese sauces at the bench start out exactly the same way they do in the kitchen: great cheese, dairy and other quality ingredients. As in the kitchen, I try to source the best ingredients first and go from there. I know that the gold-standard sauce I develop has to be able to be duplicated as the “gold standard” for the customer. The challenge is to achieve the same result in the much-larger scaled-up version.