Rule No. 3
Photo: Amy Albert
Be gentle with the heat.
Choosing the right cheese is important, but that’s not the only secret to success. You must also treat the cheese kindly during cooking. Even if you’re using the perfect cheese for a dish, too high a temperature or too much heating time can make its proteins tighten up, squeezing out both water and fat. Result: rubbery globs of protein awash in a pool of grease. When this happens to pizza (and it often does because pizza is baked in such a hot oven), it’s not the worst thing in the world, but when it happens to a cheese fondue, you’ve got a flop on your hands. And, unfortunately, these changes aren’t reversible. But there are a few steps you can take to keep your cheese from meeting this sad fate:
Shred it. By shredding cheese, you increase the surface area that’s in contact with the heat source, which reduces the amount of time the cheese will take to melt.
Give it a head start. Bringing cheese to room temperature before you hit it with heat also lessens the amount of time the cheese needs to be exposed to heat before it melts.
Use low heat. Although not all recipes call for it, cheese prefers low heat. At higher temperatures, the proteins in the cheese are more likely to seize up and squeeze out fat and moisture. So if you need to finish off a cheese topping under the broiler, keep a watchful eye on it and take care to expose it to the heat only long enough for the cheese to melt.
The melting categories of cheese
The names of the cheeses in this table are generic, because cheeses go by many names and may have many variations. One farmer’s artisanal Swiss may not be the same as the Swiss made by another farmer on the Alp down the road.
Stretchy and stringy melters —
These are the cheeses we love on pizza, in panini, and stuffed into croquettes. They stay pretty much where we put them, without running all over the place, and they can form extremely long strings when pulled.
Smooth and flowing melters —
This category claims the largest number of cheeses. Some are viscous when melted, while others have little body. These cheeses are great for making toasted sandwiches; topping soups or vegetable tarts; stuffing into vegetables; adding richness to baked pasta dishes; and folding into biscuit, scone, and bread dough. They also blend smoothly into other dishes, such as polenta, mashed potatoes, risotto, and soufflés.
Blue cheeses(they melt around the mold)
Soft-ripened cheeses like Brie and Camembert (the rind will not melt)
These cheeses can actually be grilled, fried, or baked; though they may soften when heated, they won’t lose their shape and flow. There are a few possible reasons that some cheeses don’t melt: The cheese might be extremely high in salt. Or it might be low or high in acid, or it might contain high levels of whey proteins (during the cheese-making process, whey is removed from most cheese).
Fresh Mexican cheeses such as queso blanco, queso fresco, ranchero, cotija
Fresh goat cheese
*What about Parmigiano? —
Very hard, aged cheeses like Parmigiano don’t fit cleanly into these categories. If you finely grate them and add them to a sauce or a dish with moisture, they will melt smoothly, but due to their own lack of moisture, they won’t melt very well alone.