Let's talk about Cheese!

What good would a cheese fountain be without a quality cheese? Our thoughts exactly. After reviewing a bunch of videos on youtube we determined that melting solid cheese for a fountain is a huge mistake. It turns out that cheese likes to clump and separate as it melts rather than liquefy, so after an exhaustive search of recipes we determined that we'd use a product called "Cheese Sauce". While not exactly a cheese, cheese sauce is something that is strip-mined in Texas and refined and sold in 55 gallon barrels by DuPont.

Seriously, the brand we chose was Bakers & Chefs from Sam's Club. What we liked most about this brand was that it is delicious and can be thinned with either water or whole milk, so we should have been able to thin it to the proper consistency.

Sam's had two flavors: Nacho and Cheddar, so we purchased 3 cans of each. We used one can of each flavor as is, and we "hotted-up" the others by adding various hot sauces. Now is the point where we need to admit that we made an error in judgment. You see, the label said that the cheese sauce could be thinned with either one cup of water or up to two cups of whole milk, so we purchase two gallons of milk and had it in a fridge near by.

As we mixed the cheeses and prepped them for heating it struck me that perhaps it wasn't a great idea to add milk to the cheese and then heat in the warming oven. The question that kept gnawing at me was how hot does that oven actually get? We really didn't know, so despite the fact that we wouldn't be able to get the cheese as thin with the water option it just seemed like the safe thing to do. This is why you see me adding more hot water about mid-way through the video... that darn cheese just wasn't flowing properly! Should have gone with the milk, but we could have nuked it and added it just prior to adding the cheese to the fountain. Oh well, perhaps you can benefit from our mistake.

This cheese was excellent and we couldn't give it a higher recommendation. To the best of our knowledge it can only be purchased at Sam's in 6.62 lbs cans, so we've added a hyperlink to each if you click on the photos at right. Heck, while we're at it we'll even make Wallace a link too. Cheese!