hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with queso deb that's right i'm
going to show you how to make a cheese dip that's better looking better for you
and way way better tasting than anything you're gonna get at the store and of
course whether that amount of extra effort is going to be worth it is going
to be up to you and will depend on factors like how much you plan on
drinking but if you do decide to make your queso dip from scratch you want to
use this very easy and virtually foolproof technique and to get started
what we'll do is grate about a 1/2 pound of cheese and I usually don't film this
but it's come to my attention - some of you are still using pre grated cheese
which i think is a terrible idea since it's usually of lesser quality and
coated with cellulose dust so do me and your guests a favor and take the extra
minute or less it takes to grate this yourself oh and in case you're wondering
I'm using a nice sharp white cheddar here but any melty cheese will work and
sometimes I'll go with half Monterey Jack and half cheddar since that's how
they did it in the Mexican restaurant I worked out in college so feel free to
use whatever you want I mean you are after all the hey-zeus of
your cases which by the way is a much better rhyme in English but anyway no
matter what cheese we use once it's grated we're gonna toss it with 1
tablespoon of cornstarch alright just sprinkle it over and take a spoon and
give it a toss and then as soon as our cheese has been successfully starched we
will set that aside and we can move on to preparing the base of our dip and for
that we're gonna melt about a tablespoon of butter over medium high heat to which
we will add some finely minced or crushed garlic as well as some sliced
green onions and I'm just using the white and lighter parts here but we will
save some of the dark green parts to garnish the top later if we want and
then to our garlic and onions we will also add a nice big pinch of salt as
well as a little bit of ground Chipotle which as you probably know is a smoked
jalapeno and we'll finish up with a little bit of cumin and then what we'll
do is cook this stirring on medium high for just 2 minutes ok we're not trying
to brown or caramelize anything here all we're doing is taken off the Rodge so
like I said we will only give that a couple minutes before adding the next
two ingredients which would be 1/2 cup of canned fire roasted chilies
and I'm actually using hatch chilies here but any of your popular
fire-roasted camp peppers will work as would of course freshly fire roasted
chilies oh yeah you get extra credit for that and I will also toss in some diced
seeded tomatoes and we'll go ahead and give that a stir and cook this for like
two minutes and by the way as you might know I'm not
a huge fan of using fresh tomatoes in the middle of winter but I'm happy to
report this is one of the few recipes where terrible supermarket tomatoes
actually work pretty well so this time at least we can include those without
any shame and then what we'll do after we've cooked our tomatoes and peppers
for a couple minutes is add one can of evaporated milk which depending on the
brand you use will come in lots of different colors none of which will be
white all right they can range from a pale yellow to a light brown but don't
be concerned okay that color happens because of the way the milk is condensed
which reminds me please do not accidentally use sweetened
condensed milk that will not be good and what we'll do after stirring that in is
wait for it to come up to a boil because once it does what we'll do is give it a
stir and then carefully and confidently add our cheese and we will stir that in
and the combination of our melting cheese plus that cornstarch swelling up
in this hot liquid is going to thicken this mixture up and then very important
as soon as our cheese is melted we want to immediately turn off the heat all
right we never want to boil a cheese sauce because it will get all grainy and
separated and not have a good texture so as soon as that cheese melts turn off
your heat and then we'll finish this up by stirring in a nice handful of chopped
cilantro if you're going to use it okay if you don't like it don't put it it's
not gonna bother me at all but I do like it so I'm gonna stir some in and that's
it at this point our queso dip is pretty much done except of course we have to
taste it for seasoning which we are not going to do off a spoon or our finger
all right we need to use a chip which have salt on them and by tasting this on
a chip we will get a much more accurate gauge for whether we have to adjust the
seasoning and I decided might need a little more salt and a little more heat
so I gave it a few shakes of cayenne and gave it one final stir and that's it
once that's tasting exactly how we want will
go ahead and serve it up next are probably a whole bunch of corn chips and
I hope you like how those look because those took me about 30 minutes to
arrange but anyway we will serve that up and maybe top it with some more diced
tomato and possibly a little scattering of green onion plus one last gratuitous
shake of cayenne and that's it our queso is now ready for our face though so let
me go ahead and dip in and that my friends as you can imagine was
absolutely delicious and as I mentioned earlier sure this takes a little more
work but the taste and texture of this is so far superior than anything out of
a jar it is not even close to the same experience oh and speaking of texture is
this stuff cools down it will thicken up but only to a certain point all right
one of the things I love about this recipe is even when it's fully cooled it
still retains a beautiful creamy smooth texture and above and beyond avoiding
like a dozen ingredients we can't spell or pronounce the beauty of making this
from scratch is that you can easily tell if this to your own personal tastes okay
we already said you could add different cheeses but you could also have things
like pickled vegetables or maybe some roasted corn or yes even a handful of
nice crispy bacon but anyway that's it how I like to make queso cheese dip
which if you don't speak Spanish translates to cheese cheese dip but
anyway whether you're going to serve this for the big game or just any old
time your craving of delicious cheesy snack I really do hope you give this a
try soon so head over to food which is calm for all the ingredient amounts of
more info as usual and as always enjoy
you