Melty Cheese Slices

Here in the Philippines, all cheese is imported and the selection is limited. While cheese slices are available, they are small, very thin, and not particularly tasty. Luckily we have some great Australian imported cheeses to play with. Over at the Serious Eats website, I ran into a recipe for making your own "melty cheese slices". They were primarily for burgers, but once we made them and found out how good they were, we use them with all sorts of things, bacon-egg-cheese sandwiches, cheese and bacon omelets, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Like our homemade bacon, I expect we will still be making these after we return to the States.

Making you own extra tasty cheese slices is pretty simple:

Equipment:

Pan
cookie sheet
plastic wrap/cling wrap
food thermometer
stick blender or stand blender

Ingredients:
12 ounces of cheese (I like a mild Cheddar, my wife loves a Red Leicester)
4 ounces of evaporated milk
1 package (1 tablespoon) of plain gelatin
1 tablespoon of water

Steps:

1- Shred the Cheddar cheese (I use the larger holes to shred)
2- Hydrate the tablespoon of gelatin with the tablespoon of water, while bringing the 4 ounces of Evaporated Milk to a simmer in your pan.
3- When the Evaporated Milk is simmering, add the hydrated gelatin into it and stir until completely dissolved.
4- Reduce heat to medium or medium low.
5- Add the shredded Cheddar cheese into the Evaporated Milk and stir until it completely melts.
6- Bring the melted cheese/Evaporated Milk back to 160F.
7- Use the Stick Blender to smooth the mixture for 30 to 45 seconds. You can do this off heat. You can also use a stand blender, but it is a lot messier!
8- Spread the hot cheese onto the cookie pan that is lined with cling wrap. Smooth out and place a second sheet of cling wrap over the top. It is much easier to finish getting the cheese spread evenly with this second sheet of plastic wrap.
9- Place the sheet in your refrigerator or freezer to chill down. When cold use kitchen scissors to cut into squares.
10- Store in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator and don't forget to peel the cling wrap off before using. But leave on until you use it, it keeps the cheese from sticking together.

Note: I use large commercial baking sheets called "half sheets" or "Jelly Roll Sheets" that are roughly 12 inches by 17 inches. This recipe fills about 3/4 of one. We make our cheese slices slightly thicker than commercial cheese slices. Sometimes, if we want very thick slices, we will do a double recipe. If you have smaller baking sheets you may need to use two of them.

The original recipe is found here: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/...es-for-burgers-and-grilled-cheese-recipe.html

How much fun is it to make these?!? I made some from Tilamook Cheddar and oh man was it amazing. They almost melted too good! Lol.

If you can get whole milk, why not make your own cheese? It's not hard and most of what you need can be found at the hardware store.

I want to make cheese too, though producing cheddar and similar cheeses is a bit more complex than simple white cheeses. The melty cheese slices recipe simply lets you kick your burgers or any cheese slice friendly food up a notch with cheese slices that have more flavor. When making them, sometimes we do two batches of different colored cheeses at the same time and then create roughly striped cheese slices that have more than one type of cheese in them. Fun to play with, pretty simple and once you've done it a couple of times, it is probably half an hour total to do.