Roseyland

Advancements In Beer Cheese

For a while now, I have been attempting to create a beer cheese spaghetti sauce similar to the beer cheese sauce at one of my favorite restaurants (Spaghetti Works in Nebraska and Iowa). I documented my last attempt at beer cheese sauce in this post. It made a tasty beer cheese soup, but it still didn’t have the taste I was looking for. Then I received an anonymous comment to my blog post suggesting that I try Gouda cheese, Blue Moon beer, and a can of cream of mushroom soup. The can of cream of mushroom soup intrigued me, because that very well could have been the taste I was looking for. I love sautéed mushrooms (like you get at outback steakhouse), and sometimes sautéed mushrooms are made with beer (usually burgundy I think, but sometimes beer). I never realized it before, but sautéed mushrooms and the beer cheese sauce from Spaghetti Works have a strangely similar flavor. This new recipe was fairly simple, so I gave it a try. Here are my ingredients:

I didn’t know much about Gouda cheese before this, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Gouda cheese is named after the city of Gouda in the Netherlands. It comes in young and old varieties. The young variety is a softer creamier cheese and the old variety is a harder brittle cheese. You can read the Wikipedia article here. The younger variety seems to be the only one you can easily find, and I figured it would melt better anyways, so I went with the most straight forward looking Gouda cheese I saw. I was going to shred it, but it was pretty soft and I thought it would melt easily, so I just cut it into pieces like this:

I didn’t have any instructions, so I just put the soup, beer, and half the cheese into a sauce pot on medium heat and stirred. The cheese seemed to be melting fairly well, but it looked like it needed more cheese to reach the right thickness, so I put in the rest of the cheese. After about 10 minutes, it looked like everything was going okay. Like this:

It needed to thicken up a bit if it had any hope of becoming a spaghetti sauce, so I kept stirring. I tried not to let it boil, but I failed. Pretty soon I started to notice that the cheese hadn’t melted quite right. I think somehow I turned it into cheese curd or something. The sauce was watery with a big glob of rubbery cheese like material in it. This is what it looked like:

Here is another picture:

I was about to consider this attempt a complete failure, but I tasted the watery part of the sauce and it wasn’t bad. Actually, it was very good. I’m not sure if it is the same as the Spaghetti Works sauce, but it’s definitely the best tasting beer cheese sauce I have made so far. I also tasted the rubbery cheese like material. I know you are thinking that’s gross, but I figured it couldn’t hurt me, and it was for science. The rubbery stuff tasted good too, rubbery, but good. I poured the watery portion of the sauce into a bowl. This is the big mass of rubbery stuff that was left in the sauce pot:

Gross huh? Here’s the watery stuff in a bowl:

I actually ate this with the saltine crackers, and it was very tasty. Thank you anonymous commenter. If you are still out there, could you tell me how to make it look like spaghetti sauce? I think next time I will mix the soup and an equal amount of cheese together first. I’ll slowly melt them over low heat and then add the beer a little bit at a time. It would probably help to shred the cheese too, rather than just cutting it into pieces. This recipe might work well in a crock pot, since I think melting the cheese slowly would help prevent the rubbery cheese curd effect. I’d also like to try this recipe with Michelobe Amber Bock, which is what I used in my previous attempt. Does anybody out there have any other suggestions? You know, somebody who unlike me knows something about cooking? I wonder if that cupcake blogger would help me?

May 26th, 2008 Posted by Rosey | Good Eats | one comment