My Queso Recipe
Yesterday, I produced my best queso yet in terms of consistency and taste, and would love to share the recipe with you!
I haven’t been iterating on this queso recipe for very long, so I expect to continually make my best ever for some time. It’s not necessarily the most inventive recipe in the world. But it works, and it’s tasty, and it’s mine, and I already tricked you into reading this blog — so you might as well stick around!
First, there was void. Then light. Screaming, now. Screaming for pain and terror and unwanted new experiences. I want to go back, but no such luck: life has begun.
Then a lot of other things happened — at one point I even started a blog — and arrived here.
Let’s begin!
First, you need to get some ingredients.
Before that, though, it’s been a long day and you’re surprisingly tired. It’s 2:30 PM, so you should do some quick calculations in your head and decide that — since your sister’s game night is at 6:00 — you have time for a cheeky nap. Set an alarm for 30 minutes and grab a quick snooze as your dogs snuggle up with you. They love a good leg hole.1
When you wake, run some more calculations and decide you can actually go for another 30. You dastardly dog, you; undeserving of the trust of your past self; though it was foolish to place its faith in you. Go back to sleep.
It’s 3:30 now, so you should accept your fate and get up. Hastily put on your shoes and find your keys — they’ll be under the piece of paper on your kitchen counter that you should’ve tidied up by now — and mumble to your girlfriend that you have to go to the store to get queso ingredients. She’ll ignore you; this is expected when she’s reading.
Rub your eyes — they are sore for being woken at a strange point in the sleep cycle — and get in your car. Shit, you forgot your sunglasses. One can’t do without their sunnies! Grab them, get back in your car, and open the garage door. Make sure not to hit your girlfriend, who will have somehow teleported from her position on the couch to just outside your garage, tipping over your trash can to free it of some rain that had accumulated. She’ll get in your car and apologize for not responding earlier, but in fact, she is coming to the store. This will be just fine with you.
At the grocery store, you’ll want to pick up the following ingredients:
Cheese
Note: pre-shredded cheese is for simpletons. It is not the same as a block of cheese you shred yourself.
4oz White American
When the woman running the deli misunderstands and gives it to you in slices instead of a block, say nothing.
7oz Extra Sharp White Cheddar
Get good stuff, not Kraft
A ball of Mozzarella
The size of your fist or thereabouts
Vegetables
3 Jalapeños
Jalapenos work fine too
1 large white onion
1 garlic bulb
Misc. Foodstuff
1 pint Heavy Whipping Cream
Corn Starch
Some 2% milk
Butter or olive oil
Requisite spices
Salt and pepper
Cumin
Cayenne
Paprika
Dippers (tortilla chips, pretzels, etc)
Cooking Stuff If You Don’t Have It Already For Some Embarrassing Reason
1 medium saucepan
1 small/medium pan to sauté vegetables
A whisk
Plastic if you don’t want to mess up your nonstick saucepan; metal if you’re a man
Cheese shredder
Something bowl-like — should the technology exist — to hold your finished result.
Stuff for game night
Bottled margarita for yourself
Pack of Truly for your girlfriend
Nothing for anyone else
Fuck ‘em
As you drive home, reflect on your blog. Ask yourself why it means so much to you when people engage with your work. Is it even possible to stay true to oneself while also caring what people think? Conclude that you should post more substantial posts and less — but not no — music.
When you get home, you’ll still have plenty of time before you should actually start cooking; dick around for about an hour. When your terrible dogs start harassing you for their meal at 5PM, you’ll know it’s about the right time to start choppin’.
Put on some music — it’s time to cook, baby.
Sharpen your largest kitchen knife more than you need to. A sharp knife is a fun knife. Have a horrible vision of accidentally dropping it on your dog, always underfoot while you cook, and ruminate on this for some time. Try your best to push it out of your mind.
Wash your Jalapeños and dry them off. Observe that they look rather wilted and lame; go confront your girlfriend about this, for she’s the one who picked them out. She’ll respond “yes, well, dear, those were the best ones they had”. Feel like a foolish prick.
Cut your Jalaps in half; core and deseed two of them, leaving the third as-is, because you’re not sure which way will be the best. Cut each of the six halves into thin strips, while realizing that you’re not going to know how to communicate this step on your blog because you’ve always been confused by what “lengthwise” and “crosswise” actually are. They shouldn’t be very long, so probably crosswise. Cut some of the strips in half, leaving the others untouched — for the science of it all.
Peel and quarter the onion. Regret buying such a large onion to only use 1/4th of it. Dice that shit good. Save the other 3/4ths of an onion in a ziplock bag in the fridge so your girlfriend won’t judge you for wasting food.
Mince two cloves of garlic.
Put all the veggies in a bowl together.
Measure out a cup of heavy whipping cream and a tablespoon of corn starch. Set them aside, with your sauce pan, whisk, cheeses, and shredder.
Melt 1.5 tablespoons of butter in your sautéing pan over highish heat. Consider using olive oil instead, but reject this notion — you’re making melted fucking cheese, this isn’t the time for health concerns.
When the butter is melted, pour in all the vegetables. Mix them up so they’re evenly covered in butter. Season with salt and pepper.
Once the vegetables have been cooking for a few minutes, go really just crazy with the spices. These veggies will mostly be how the queso gets its spice, so they should be spiced far beyond the point of enjoyment if you were to just eat them on their own. The queso will moderate the spice significantly.
Sauté the vegetables, stirring frequently, until you decide they’re probably done. It’ll be hard to tell with all the spices masking their color. Set them aside, keeping them warm somehow if you can. Decide that your next experiment will be to cook the Jalapeños for a few minutes before adding the onion and garlic.
You’re ready for the main event. Fix up a glass of wine.
Pour the whipping cream into the saucepan (the pan you didn’t use for the vegetables), and whisk in the corn starch. Set the heat to medium-medium-low. Begin a rapid cycle of stirring for a while then letting it sit for a few seconds, so you can see if it’s begun to boil. The instant you notice some bubbling — or, as a last resort, when you notice the mixture start to thicken or congeal — set the heat quite low and take the saucepan off the heat entirely to rest for just a few seconds.
This all needs to happen correctly in the next few minutes, so pay attention before starting.
Return the pan to heat and immediately start doing what I’m about to describe.
Start shredding in your cheese over the saucepan. You’ll want to use all of your White American and Cheddar, as well as maybe half your mozzarella ball (depending on how large it is, for I don’t know). Shred in some cheese; whisk until it’s smooth; repeat until done.
You need to make sure you’re keeping the whole mixture in near-constant motion, except for when you’re shredding. You should be a bit panicked during this phase, shredding as fast as possible to get back to whisking. If the mixture sits undisturbed on heat for too long, it’ll start breaking down the bonds or whatever and get weird and stringy.
Once you’ve added in all the cheese, you’ll probably want to add a little milk to make it less thick. Add a dash of milk; whisk until it’s all mixed in; repeat as desired. For the first little bit after adding each bit of milk, it’ll probably look like you’ve fucked it all up, and that the milk isn’t going to mix in well. Just keep whisking; it’ll all join together.
At any point during all of the above, you may need to increase the heat to make things mix together better. But that might ruin it if you overdo it. Do be careful. Once things are mixing well, take the heat back down. Never go above a 3.
When you’ve reached the desired consistency, stir in your veggies. Taste the queso muchly, you pig, you. If the spice isn’t enough, add more — you’re the god of this realm.
Pour it into a bowl and eat it.
Regret not taking any photos of any step of the process.
Click here for a version of the recipe that isn’t trying to be quite so clever.
I refuse to explain other than to say that this is not sexual or gross in any way