11 KiB
+++ categories = ["food"] tags = ["reverse-engineer","chipotle"] date = 2024-12-06T15:36:00Z description = "Formulating a thin, freezer-friendly imitation of Chipotle queso blanco using nutrition data, cheese, sodium citrate, dairy, and seasonings." draft = false slug = "queso-blanco" title = "🧀 Chipotle Queso Blanco" author = "nicholas" +++
The purpose of creating this cheese sauce is to cheaply mimic the some features of Chipotle's cheese sauce so that I can add it to freezer burrito bowls. It is meant to have a very thin and fluid consistency that will give moisture to offset the dryer ingredients such as beans and rice.
This log entry is not meant to recreate exactly Chipotle's Queso Blanco. It is to create something that shares its desirable features and to make the preparation straightforward and fail-safe. And to learn more about making cheese sauces.
Nutrition
The first place to start is the nutrition information for the food product. The Chipotle website provides nutrition info for each of their menu items, including the Queso Blanco. I am able to find the nutrition facts for different portions: entrée, side, and large. I choose to base my calculations on the large portion because choosing the largest available portion size will minimize errors introduced by the FDA rules regarding rounding. For example, if a product serving size contains 50 calories or less, the value is to be rounded to the nearest 5-calorie increment (e.g., 47 → 45, 52 → 50). Otherwise they are to be rounded to the nearest 10-calorie increment (e.g., 154 → 150, 156 → 160). It is unlikely any of this will have an important effect, but is seems to be the better option.
| Portion | Calories | Calories From Fat | Total Fat (g) | Saturated Fats (g) | Trans Fat (g) | Cholesterol (mg) | Sodium (mg) | Carbohydrates (g) | Dietary Fiber (g) | Sugar (g) | Protein (g) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 oz | 480 | 330 | 37 | 23 | 1.5 | 120 | 980 | 14 | <1 | 5 | 20 |
Ingredients
The next critical piece of data -- the ingredient list -- is also supplied by the website.
| Ingredient |
|---|
| White Cheddar Cheese |
| Monterey Jack Cheese |
| Farm Fresh Dairy |
| Cultured Cream |
| Serrano Peppers |
| Poblano Peppers |
| Chipotle Peppers |
| Tomatoes |
| Yellow Onion |
| Garlic |
| Cornstarch |
| Salt |
| Water |
{{< image src="images/queso-blanco-ingredients.PNG" caption="Queso Blanco ingredient list" >}}
I had not fully realized just how committed Chipotle is to being a "clean label" food until I started to see their marketing material on the ingredient pages of their website. They have gone so far as to create their entire menu using just 53 different ingredients. This would seem to offer hope that reverse engineering it and preparing it will be easy work, and indeed this is true in a sense, but in the case of an emulsified cheese mixture an ultimately mistaken notion. Chipotle's marketing even gestures at the same idea:
Real is better. Better for You, Better for People, Better for Our Planet. It may be the hard way to do things, but it’s the right way.
Now, I cannot speak for anyone else, but I cannot agree or disagree with this. It is part of the art of forming a platitudinous brand statement. There is nothing there.
But to return to the point, the thinking goes: making a cheese sauce using the same ingredients as Chipotle is easy. Simply combine them all in a saucepot and heat until the cheese melts. Simple as. But it will not be good. Making a good cheese sauce with the same set of simple ingredients is actually a tricky thing. The cornstarch must gelatinize, which requires it be heated to at least 203 degrees F. Insufficient gelatinization will result in a gritty texture. And the emulsion that constitutes the monterrey jack and cheddar cheese must not break, and it will at these high temperatures. The sour cream will curdle under these conditions too, forming ugly little lumps. All of these issues and more like them can be overcome -- obviously. Chipotle has managed it and almost anyone can too, but I remind myself of what I am trying to do here. I am not trying to atom-for-atom clone Queso Blanco from Chipotle at any cost. I am doing this for fun -- to learn more about why food manufacturers do what they do, how they do it, and most importantly how to make my own food taste as good as theirs. Just because I can does not mean I should. And why should I make it more difficult for myself when something like sodium citrate exists, for example.
Shortcuts
There are many shortcuts and cost-cutting measures that are available to me. In the context of cheese sauces, this becomes very obvious when reading through the ingredient lists of just about any supermarket cheese sauce -- they rarely look anything like Chipotle's Queso Blanco. They take a lot of shortcuts, use a lot of "artificial ingredients", and they still taste very good! For example, in place of using large amounts of actual cheese -- which is, at least as far as our palates and finances are concerned, a relatively expensive mixture of fat, protein, and a cheese flavor -- these products contain things like soybean oil, whey protein concentrate, and nonfat dry milk. This is good news for me. It gives me a lot of flexibility in creating my own cheese sauce solution that balances the factors I care about. As always, I want the preparation of the food item to be practical. I want it to taste good, and I want it to be cheaper than buying it from a supermarket. I will try to use aspects of two different strategies -- cost-cutting profit-maxxing and shelf-life-maxxing strategies of global food brands, and the practical, simple, clean-label, home cook-friendly ingredient lists of brands like Chipotle -- to create my own cheese sauce.
Sodium Citrate
Chipotle backed themselves into a corner -- they can't use artificial ingredients for fear of losing their clean label credibility. I do not worry about such things. Sodium citrate will allow me to mistreat my cheese sauce to a degree that would simply ruin Chipotle's cheese sauce ten times over. This is the real value add. I can go fast. Heat, reheat, overmix, whatever -- I can do everything wrong to this sauce and the emulsion is unlikely to break. No grittiness, no lumps. This works because sodium citrate slightly reduces the acidity of the cheese sauce, which makes the proteins more soluble and well-distributed. This is how I avoid clumping. Also, Sodium citrate binds to the calcium ions that hold the protein molecules together in a tight network. With fewer ions binding proteins together, the network loosens which results in a cheese that is easier to melt and emulsify.
Cheese Mix
The foundation upon which I build the recipe is the cheese mixture. Per Chipotle's own ingredient list, the Queso Blanco uses both Monterey Jack and Sharp White Cheddar. I cannot derive relative amounts from what is given on paper. It occurs to me that since pepper jack cheese is essentially monterey jack with the addition of peppers, it may be sensible to use this instead of monterey jack. The product will have all the desirable melting and consistency properties as Monterey jack, but comes already seasoned with well-balanced proportion of jalapeno peppers. The only thing I will need to do is add chipotle pepper to compensate for the cheese being diluted with water, milk, etc, and to add the signature Chipotle flavor. This will simplify the process a great deal.
Farm Fresh Dairy
This seems to simply be milk or cream, transfigured by an emotive conjugation into a bucolic wholesome beverage suited for hobbits. I will not be using "farm fresh dairy" but instead milk powder dissolved in water, and maybe some oil. I name this mixture "natural and healthy good milk that is clean and good for your body". I use milk powder because my milk consumption cannot keep pace with the rate at which the milk deteriorates into undrinkably sour curdled toxic sludge. My guess that this "farm fresh dairy" is actually just cream is because I am failing imaging what else it could be. The sour cream and cheese dairy products are already present, so it must not be those. It must be some sort of milk product. Also, there needs to be some proteins and fats available when the dairy emulsions (cheese, sour cream) are melted into the mixture. Water alone does not contain proteins, so there is nothing for the other proteins to bind to but themselves, and there is already just enough to sustain their own emulsions. The dairy products would disperse and form clumps. Milk has lots of protein to allow cheese to form emulsion with cheese and cream.
Cultured Cream
A quick peek at the ingredient list for Chipotle's Sour Cream reveals that it is made of one ingredient: cultured cream. Therefore I reason that the reverse is also true -- Chipotle's cultured cream is sour cream. This is mostly water and some fat, and protein to hold it all together. This ingredient is unlikely to be important in creating a good cheese sauce. I do not know why Chipotle includes it. Maybe to add a different kind of tangy sourness to the sauce, which would once again reflect the decision to exclude "artificial" ingredients. This is because it is common for jarred cheese sauces to include instead things like lactic acid and vinegar. I suspect I can simplify by excluding this ingredient and substituting with something that does not spoil as quickly as sour cream.
Seasonings and Additions (Tomatoes, Garlic, Onion, Peppers)
There are a few other ingredients listed that I will not bother with now. The the aim is to create a base cheese sauce to build on. The effect these inclusions have on the nutrition numbers are minimal, so they can be added later and not change much.
Spreadsheet Math
The formulation will come down to several factors that I care about.
- Consistency -- This will be about how much water is included. Chipotle has 480 calories for every 8 oz. portion of Queso Blanco. Basically if I begin with a weight of 8 oz and subtract the weight of cheese that amounts to 480 calories, and add the remaining weight in water, I should have a similar consistency after thickening.
The game I need to play here is to fiddle with the proportions of cheese, sour cream, milk, and water until I achieve a macronutrient makeup similar to Chipotle's. In other words, the constraints are basically the nutrition table above. There is a small enough range of possible values of these proportions that I can get pretty close without resorting to linear algebra. The mixture must thin and therefore contain a lot of water.