The Hirshon Super-Smooth Smoky Cheese Dip with Pickled Peppers – Chile con Queso

Hola, Citizens – and welcome to the Latin vibe permeating today’s proclamation from on-high, all courtesy of the Sultan of Spice, the Chevalier of Cheese Himself! As I have recently found Myself with a plethora of leftover quality cheeses from a gathering of friends, I needed to find a way to transform them – to elevate the individual elements into a grand symphony of flavor worthy of the nuanced palate of TFD Nation! The issue? These cheeses don’t melt well together (unlike fondue, for example) – but I found the solution in a science-infused version of Chile con Queso that will wow all of you!

Chile con queso (Spanish for “chile with cheese”), sometimes simply called queso, is an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips. Chile con queso (also spelled chili con queso) is a part of Tex-Mex and Southwestern cuisine. Chile con queso is likely a derivative of Queso flameado from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Chile con queso is predominantly found on the menus of Tex-Mex restaurants in the southwest and western United States.

Chile con queso is a smooth, creamy sauce, used for dipping, that is made from a blend of melted cheeses (often American cheese, Velveeta or another processed cheese, Monterey Jack or cream cheese), cream, and chili peppers. Many restaurants serve chile con queso with such added ingredients as pico de gallo, black beans, guacamole, and ground beef or pork. Chile con queso is a warm dish, heated to a desired temperature. Chile con queso can be eaten with tortillas, tortilla chips, or pita chips which are thicker than regular tortilla chips.

It can also be used as a condiment on fajitas, tacos, enchiladas, migas, quesadillas or any other Tex-Mex dish. While Tex-Mex restaurants often offer chips and salsa free of charge, queso is usually offered for an additional charge. It can be made with various cheeses. Usually it is white or yellow in color. Although chile con queso is commonly called “queso”, it should not be confused with “cheese dip,” which is specifically cheese without the peppers.

There is an extraordinary history of chile con queso on foodrepublic.com that I shall now quote extensively from:

Reprinted with permission from Queso!:

In the late 1500s, Spanish explorers arrived in the area around what is known today as El Paso, Texas, along the Mexican-American border. With them, they brought livestock, such as cows and goats, which that part of the world had never seen. Dairy was not known to the Native Americans, as their diet was made up of indigenous ingredients such as corn, squash, and chiles. From that point, however, as the old world connected with the new, it was perhaps inevitable that one day cheese would be paired with chiles and a culinary alliance would be born.

Although the exact moment when chile con queso came into existence has not been determined, the earliest reference to it in print can be found in the 1816 Mexican novel, El Periquillo Sarniento (The Mangy Parrot) by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. The next citation occurred in 1865 in the Mexican poem “Glosa del Chile Verde con Queso,” in which an anonymous poet laments that women of his era know much about artifice and fashion but little about practical matters such as stewing chiles with cheese.

Despite the presence of chile con queso in the literature of the day, Mexican cookbooks from the 1800s did not feature recipes with that name, though dishes composed of chiles with cheese did exist. One such recipe, Chiles Poblanos, found in the 1887 cookbook La Cocinera Poblana, was made up of poblano chiles, cheese, and tomatoes.

Although chile con queso most likely originated in Mexico, the first published recipe to use the phrase appeared in the United States. An 1896 article about Mexican cuisine in the magazine, The Land of Sunshine included a dish called Chiles Verdes con Queso, which was a mixture of long green chiles, tomatoes, and cheese. Like all early Mexican versions, it was intended to be a side dish, with the cheese enhancing the chiles, much like cheese melted onto cauliflower. Its evolution to a dip was yet to come.

Now, looking toward Europe, Swiss fondue and its British counterpart, Welsh rarebit (or rabbit), became popular in the United States in the late 1800s. Fondue is a pot of melted cheese for dipping bread and vegetables; Welsh rarebit is a melted cheese dish that is poured over toast. Neither was considered a side dish but instead was an appetizer or the main event of a meal.

Then, in 1908, a Kentucky newspaper ran a recipe for Mexican rarebit, a take on Welsh rarebit that added chile pulp to a base of melted cheese, milk, and egg and was served over toast. In 1909, the San Francisco newspaper Call published a similar recipe, but replaced the chile pulp with chili powder, a blend of ground ancho chiles with herbs and spices, such as oregano and cumin. One of the fathers of chili powder was a German immigrant in Texas named William Gebhardt.

He began to market his Eagle Brand chili powder in 1896, and in 1911 his company produced a cookbook that included a recipe for Mexican rarebit similar to the San Francisco version.

About the same time, recipes for and references to Mexican chile con queso began appearing more frequently in the press. Eventually, an astute cook realized that combining rarebit (and getting rid of the egg often used in its preparation) and chile con queso would make for a fine dish, which leads us to a recipe for Mexican rarebit that appeared in the 1914 edition of Boston Cooking School Magazine and that called for green chiles, tomatoes, cheese, beer and corn. This version, though intended for pouring over toast, was very close to what most would consider American chile con queso today.

In Texas, chile con queso appeared in restaurants as early as 1910, when San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel offered it, according to the book The Menu Maker. (In 1922, O. M. Farnsworth asserted that the menu for his Original Mexican Restaurant, also in San Antonio, had not changed since it opened in 1900. Chile con queso was on the menu at the time, so perhaps it was served back in 1900, though no one seems to have documents to confirm this.) It is not known what form this dish took — whether it was a side dish or a sauce to be poured over tostadas or toast.

Then, in the early 1920s, a recipe with the name Chile con Queso appeared in the Woman’s Club Cook Book of Tested and Tried Recipes published by the Woman’s Club of San Antonio. Like some Mexican rarebit recipes, this chile con queso used cayenne and paprika instead of the fresh chiles found in Mexican chile con queso. But it did not contain egg and it was the first chile con queso recipe to call specifically for American cheese. A truly American queso in both name and style had arrived.

After that, chile con queso appeared frequently in Texas publications and community cookbooks. These early recipes were served over toast or tostadas or were enjoyed as dips with potato chips, crackers, tostadas, or Fritos, after their invention in 1932. American cheese was a popular choice in these early recipes; Velveeta, which was invented in 1918 but not widely marketed until later, didn’t make its first appearance in a queso recipe until 1939, in What’ll I Cook? published by the First Christian Church of Lubbock.

In 1943, Carl Roetelle opened his canning plant in Elsa, Texas, and began to market Ro-Tel tomatoes, which were tomatoes blended with green chiles. Then in 1949, a Ro-Tel ad appeared with a recipe for making a chile con queso by simply heating a can of the spicy tomatoes with American or processed cheese until melted, and serving the dip with toasted tortillas or Fritos: a Tex-Mex classic was born.

While most of Texas was enjoying chile con queso made with American cheese, green chiles, and tomatoes, in the area around El Paso and southern New Mexico, the dish with that name had more in common with what was found across the border in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. It wasn’t meant to be just a side dish any longer, however, as it was also served as an appetizer with tortilla chips and tortillas, much like it was across the rest of Texas.

Chile con queso, in all its forms and permutations, was still very much a regional specialty when First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson shared her version in the Washington Post in 1964. Despite the attention, the dish wasn’t popularized, though people in the Southwest, Texas, and Midwest continued to make queso. In these regions, it became a staple at social gatherings. There wasn’t much variation in the recipes, however, until recent years, when creative cooks took the basic formula and crafted it into something new.

The reason why virtually all chile con queso is made with American cheese or Velveeta as a base is simple – these are perhaps the two best melting cheeses on the planet and they readily combine together. While this classic version is unquestionably delicious, it limits the flavor profile to basically these two cheeses and you’re forced to ignore the much harder-to-melt but more delicious varieties of artisinal quality cheeses with far more flavor and personality. Science has come to the rescue here – as it so often does to those who appreciate its glory and implications for a better world!

As I learned from the erudite gastronomist at cheeseprofessor.com there is a chemical known as Sodium Citrate that has a unique property – it lets ANY cheese have the same super-smooth meltiness of American and Velveeta, while maintaining all their unique flavors and nuances! That means that poor melting cheeses like cheddar are now fair game to use in melted cheese sauces and cheeseprofessor.com has this to say about it in the following lightly-edited excerpt:

To best appreciate sodium citrate’s function in a cheese sauce, we must first recognize the molecular structure of cheese and what happens to that structure as it melts.

It’s helpful to think of cheese as a three-part network consisting of fat, calcium, and casein protein. Calcium serves as an adhesive that binds together the proteins, but these proteins don’t otherwise interact with the fat. “The fat globules in normal cheese are just embedded in a protein network,” says Pat Polowsky, the food scientist and dairy devotee behind the Cheese Science Toolkit. The all-too-familiar oiliness when heating cheese is due to fat leaking out of the weakened protein structure. To avoid this, “We have to use some chemical trickery to keep the fat in the cheese.”

Polowsky notes that a good (read: non-oily) fondue is the result of a successful emulsion — a stable mixture of substances that normally do not like being combined. Just think, for example, about the behavior of oil and vinegar as you’re mixing up a vinaigrette, and how a nice dollop of Dijon mustard helps flavorfully bring the two together.

With fondue, that emulsifying trickery comes from the tartaric acid that is present in wine. A squeeze of lemon juice, often added anyway for its bright flavor, can further aid emulsion thanks to the citric acid. These acids function as emulsifying salts, which, as Polowsky explains, induce emulsification by disrupting the tightly knit protein structure and thus allowing for smoother, more cohesive melting.

Because sodium citrate is such a potent emulsifying salt, it’s a common ingredient in pasteurized process cheese products. Love it or hate it, process cheese is a carefully engineered food.

A 2006 study by the American Dairy Science Association explored the effects of using sodium citrate in cheese production. While considering variable factors like pH, moisture content, and temperature, the objectives of the study were to explore cooking times and differing concentrations of sodium citrate. The 14-page study concludes with a clear finding: “The concentration of [sodium citrate] used as an [emulsifying salt] in pasteurized process cheddar cheese manufacturing greatly affected the textural and melting properties, even when process cheeses had a similar pH value.”

This unique bit of molecular gastronomy knowledge now enables my favorite white cheeses to come together in an orgiastic frenzy of pure umami flavor and cheesy goodness as one! Please note that while this is indeed My preferred cheese blend to make chili con queso, you may of course use your own favorite blend of cheeses, as thanks to the magic of Sodium Citrate, ANY cheese is at last fair game in this recipe – leave the American and Cheddar out, go NUTS!

The base recipe for My take on chile con queso comes from the cheeseprofessor site, but I have tweaked it with My preferred blend and with My preferred beer (chile con queso simply MUST have some beer in it, IMHO) and pickled chili blend as well! You’ll want to use My cheese selections (if you trust My palate – and you should!) – I use a blend of two different types of white Cheddar cheese as the base. Use a quality REAL British Cheddar like Neal’s Yard Montgomery Farmhouse Cheddar, which helps temper the bite of Boar’s Head Horseradish Cheddar (easily found in supermarkets).

I further call for 3 other cheese to add even more savor and umami – a bit of British Stilton, a goodly amount of Sardinian sheep cheese (Fiore Sardo) and a hit of Swiss Tête de Moine as well as some of a truly classic beer – London Porter, an excellent example of British Stout beer! The quick-pickled chili includes minced green Jalapeños, red Fresno chilies and some spicy yellow Manzano peppers – the Manzano is hard to find, so feel free to use a yellow or orange Habanero (if you dig the spicy!) or another milder pepper in its place.

The all-important Sodium Citrate may be easily and inexpensively at Amazon here and the huge bag will easily last you months – try it for its other molecular gastronomy uses such as in spherification! I also use a few spices in the pepper pickling liquid as well as a hint of mesquite liquid smoke flavor I’m the queso for an additional Southwestern touch.

Lastly, you will want to grace this dip SOLELY with the finest tortilla chips fried in beef tallow from cows that graze solely on grass – and that would be these from Masa chips, they’re absolutely superb and I can’t recommend them strongly enough! 😀

My Citizens, despite all the science this is still just melting cheese with beer and adding pickled chili – it’s a ridiculously simple recipe and one that I hope you IMMEDIATELY ADAPT into your culinary repertoire at earliest possible convenience!

Battle on – the Generalissimo

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