Cheese Sauces Natural And Processed

Types of Cheese Sauces For Home & Commercial Production

Here are the main types and styles:

1. Basic Cheese Sauce (Béchamel-Based / Mornay Sauce)

• Ingredients: Butter, flour, milk (to make a roux), then cheese

• Common cheeses: Cheddar, Gruyère, Parmesan

• Uses: Macaroni and cheese, vegetables (like broccoli), casseroles

2. Nacho Cheese Sauce

• Style: Smooth and pourable, often with processed cheese (like Velveeta) for consistency

• Flavor additions: Jalapeños, chili powder, cumin

• Uses: Nachos, dips, loaded fries

3. Fondue

• Ingredients: Melted Swiss cheeses (Gruyère, Emmental), wine, garlic

• Texture: Silky, often eaten with bread or vegetables

• Uses: Communal dipping

4. Blue Cheese Sauce

• Ingredients: Cream or butter base with crumbled blue cheese

• Flavour: Tangy, bold

• Uses: Steaks, wings, burgers

5. Alfredo (Cheese Variant)

• Original Alfredo is just butter and Parmesan, but modern versions may add cream and extra cheese

• Uses: Pasta dishes like fettuccine Alfredo and ravioli filled with this sauce

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Tips for a Smooth Cheese Sauce

• Grate cheese finely before adding.

• Use low heat to melt cheese gently.

• Add cheese last, after the sauce base is smooth.

• Starch helps (from roux or cornstarch) to stabilize and prevent curdling.

Processed Cheese Sauces

Processed cheese sauces differ from homemade or natural cheese sauces in several key ways, especially in ingredients, texture, flavor, and stability.

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Comparison: Natural vs. Processed Cheese Sauces

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When to Use Each

• Use Natural Cheese Sauce when flavour is key (e.g., mac and cheese from scratch, fine cooking).

• Use Processed Cheese Sauce when you need consistency, long shelf life, or easy melt (e.g., concession nachos, fast food, large-scale events).

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In short: natural cheese sauces are better for flavour and authenticity, while processed ones are superior in convenience and stability.

The Manufacture of Cheese Sauce

Processed cheese sauce is manufactured using a blend of natural cheese, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and other ingredients that ensure smooth texture, long shelf life, and resistance to separating when heated. The process is more industrial and controlled than traditional cheese sauce preparation.

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Manufacturing Process of Processed Cheese Sauce

1. Ingredient Blending

A typical commercial formula includes:

• Natural cheese (e.g., Cheddar, Colby, or others) -addition level is between 25% and 32%

• Emulsifying salts (e.g., sodium citrate, sodium phosphate) – approx. 1.5%

• Water or whey – approx. 65%

• Milk solids (e.g., nonfat dry milk). Sometimes in the form of skimmed milk powder at 1.5%

• Starches or thickeners (e.g., modified food starch, hydrocolloids). Typical gum combinations are used depending on desired texture. The principle types are xanthan gum, guar gum, pectin, kappa-carrageenan gum and sodium alginate.  A good modified starch based on waxy maize is Colflo® 67 [Ingredion]. The addition level is approximately 0.5%.

• Vegetable oils or butterfat, some use butter –added at 0.75% as a minimum otherwise the addition level is around 1.5% depending on the amount of processed cheese added.

• Salt, preservatives, and flavorings. Nisin is the preservative of choice but is not truly clean-label however it is a valuable stabiliser.

• Colours (e.g., annatto for orange colour)

These are all mixed in precise ratios for a minimum of 5 minutes to achieve consistency and shelf stability. Natural cheese needs to be shredded and then milled or can be added as a ready-made powder before heating.

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2. Cooking & Emulsification

• The mixture is transferred to industrial kettles or steam-jacketed mixers. It is possible to use vacuum heaters.

• It’s heated to around 80–90°C (160–195°F)  for up to 10 minutes:

  • Melt the cheese

  • Activate emulsifiers

  • Kill any bacteria

• High-shear mixing ensures emulsification—where fats and water blend into a stable mixture.

• The emulsifying salts break down calcium bridges in casein (milk protein), making the sauce smooth and cohesive.

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3. Homogenization

• The sauce is sometimes passed through a homogenizer to ensure a uniform texture and prevent phase separation (no oily layers or clumps).

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4. Pasteurization (Optional)

• If the sauce is to be shelf-stable, it may undergo UHT (Ultra-High Temperature) processing to kill all microorganisms.

• Otherwise, it is chilled for refrigerated storage.

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5. Packaging

• The sauce is filled into containers (pouches, cans, squeeze bottles, or bulk bags). Glass bottles offer the best stability which are capped immediately after filling. Hot-filling is probably the best approach as it is certainly the conventional method. Non-thermal processing methods are being tried when the sauce is filled into HDPE pouches that allow pressure impact.

• For shelf-stable products, aseptic packaging is used (sterile filling into sterile containers).

6. Analysis

Follow AOAC methods (2005)

• Moisture
• Fat content
• Salt content
• Ash Content
• Total nitrogen (TN) and soluble nitrogen (SN) content – use semi micro Kjeldahal method (Ling, 1963).
• Total volatile fatty acids – usually expressed as ml of 0.1 N NaOH / 100 g cheese sauce.
• pH

Physical properties

• Oil separation index (OSI) [Thomas, 1973]

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Why Processed Cheese Sauce Works So Well

• Emulsifiers prevent separation of fat and water.

• Starches thicken and give body.

• Preservatives extend shelf life.

• Heat treatment ensures microbial safety.

Sensory Issues

The addition of different stabilisers improves the visual appearance, viscosity  and organoleptic properties. Gum addition also changes the flowability and viscosity. Guar gum is said to be the best gum for a sauce but sodium alginate and xanthan gum also have considerable benefit.

Kappa-carrageenan is not recommended because the sauce has too firm a body and texture with little flow behaviour. It could be added at a much lower level and possibly in combination with another hydrocolloid.

In other studies cheese sauces were prepared by blending cheese powders, starches, skim milk powder, flavouring agents, milk and/or water to  a content of approximately 24% dry matter, then cooking to 98°C and simmering for just over 2 minutes. In these sauces the addition of starch is critical because it affects rheological behaviour.  We see different non-Newtonian viscosity patterns. Such sauces containing gums usually show thixotropic behaviour but those with Colflo ®67 will show shear thinning initially and then shear thickening with shearing times greater than 200 seconds. This is opposite to those sauces showing thixotropic behaviour. Increasing the total starch level from 2 to 4% produces sauces with greater thickness but increased susceptibility to shear thinning and higher viscosity when shearing was nearing completion.

Sauce viscosity behaviour depends on temperature. The warmer the sauce the greater the pourability.

Apparently, the variation in levels of cheese powder had little significant difference when used at levels below 10% w/w but may have had significance at higher levels.

Shelf-Life Issues

It is common for a shelf-life of 3 months to be given at ambient storage and a week or more when the hurdles are not so high. A processed cheese sauce, as with any sauce that relies on stabiliser systems will see a loss of viscosity. Salad dressing too is a good model product for assessing starch and hydrocolloid performance (Fonseca et al., 2009) and shows similar issues. The degree of loss will depend on the type of stabiliser employed and that is often noticeable with other types of sauce and condiment products. One of the other issues is the breakdown of proteins such as casein and any added whey. There is also a loss in emulsification which contributes to lower viscosity. (Hassan et al., 2015).

The oddity in viscosity change is the presence of guar gum which had different flow behaviour. On storage, processed cheese containing guar gum appears to increase in viscosity becoming thicker in texture (Hassan et al., 2015).

Another measure of change is the increase in total soluble nitrogen levels as protein levels breakdown.

Cheese Dips

Cheese dips are variants of processed cheese sauces because they are usually treated as an oil in water (o/w) type emulsion that is prepared by comminuting and blending cheeses of different ages with the aid of heat and emulsifying salts which may or may not contain dairy-derived ingredients. .

References

Aly, M. E.; A. A. Abdel- Baky; S. M. Farahat and U. U. B. Hana (1995). Quality of processed cheese spread made using ultrafilterated retentates treated with some ripening agents. Int. Dairy J. 5 (2): pp. 191 – 208

AOAC (2005). Official Methods of Analysis. 18th ed., Association of Official Analytical Chemists, Inc. Arlington. Virginia USA

Fonseca, V. C.; C. W. I. Haminiuk; D. R. Izydoro; and N. Waszczynskyj; (2009). Stability and rheological behaviour of salad dressing obtained with whey and different combinations of stabilizers. Inter. J. Food Sci. Technol. 44 (4) pp.  777–783

Guinee, T. P., O’Brien, N. B., & Rawle, D. F. (1994). The viscosity of cheese sauces with different starch systems and cheese powders. International Journal of Dairy Technology, 47(4), pp. 132-138 (Article).

Hassan, Z. M. R., El-Mahdi, L. D., & Saad, S. A. (2015). The use of food stabilizers in manufacture of cheese sauce. Journal of Biological Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, 9, pp. 357-372.

Ling, E. R. (1963). Text Book of Dairy Chemistry. Vol. 2. Practical, 3 rd ed. Chapman and Hall Ltd. London

Thomas, M. A. (1973). The use of hard milk fat fraction in process cheese. Aust. J. Dairy Tech. 49 (1): pp. 77 – 80