Just two evenings ago, in a casual conversation about Tex-Mex food, a local acquaintance immediately recited the time-honored recipe for Chile con Queso: Toss a block of Kraft Velveeta in a large sauce pan, cook over low heat until the cheese melts into a creamy consistency and add a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes and green chili. Pour this mixture into a large bowl and open a bag of tortilla chips to be dipped once into the queso. So, today's essay gave this blogger the opportunity to become a Tex-Mex foodie. If this is another (fair & balanced) look at the US melting-pot menu, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
The Truth About Queso (And How Chipotle Got It Wrong)
By Hannah Goldfield
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
In September of last year, the fast-food chain Chipotle went through its latest PR crisis, after introducing a new item to its menu: the Tex-Mex cheese dip known as queso. It was a risky move, and Chipotle knew it. Among Texans, queso is a subject of deep passion and pride. “When I die, drizzle queso over my grave,” the food writer, editor, and native Texan Helen Hollyman told me recently. “Queso is a Texan birthright,” she added, “the most critical and expected staple at any gathering, besides BBQ.” Its most common preparation, for eating with tortilla chips, consists of just two substances: a brick of Velveeta, Kraft’s highly meltable “pasteurized prepared cheese product,” and a can of Ro-Tel Diced Tomatoes and Green Chiles. Making a batch is not much harder than opening a bag of Cheetos, especially if you do the melting in the microwave, and the payoff is about the same; it’s junk food, in the most satisfying, flattering sense of the term.
Chipotle, though, which bills itself as being somewhat health- and sustainability- conscious, announced its commitment to “cracking the code” of queso made “with only real ingredients.” The cheese in its recipe was aged Cheddar, combined with both tomatoes and tomato paste, plus three kinds of chile peppers and more than a dozen other ingredients. The public’s consensus was swift: real or not, Chipotle’s queso was just plain wrong. Shares of the company’s stock fell more than three per cent soon after the release, and analysts attributed it to the social-media backlash: “Tried the new #chipotlequeso today and I think I would have experienced bolder flavor if I literally put $1.25 in my burrito,” one Twitter user wrote. “@ChipotleTweets plz go to Texas and try queso... currently eating a chip dipped in disappointment,” another lamented. Just a few months later, Chipotle went back to the test kitchen and released a tweaked version, one that was supposedly creamier. “Chipotle changed its queso recipe, and now it’s good,” Business Insider reported, in December.
Or was it? On a gray day the same month, I decided to find out for myself and wandered into a branch, on Broadway in NoHo, just before the lunch rush. I ordered queso as a side (it’s also available as a burrito topping), a lidded plastic cupful with a paper bag of tortilla chips. The queso’s first offense, alas, is that it was not creamy but thin, more soupy than any dip should be, and strangely light, with none of the satisfying heft one expects from melted cheese. The flavor was sharp and a little sour. Worst of all, it was grainy and almost fluffy, as if someone preparing the sauce for a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese had failed to let the powder fully dissolve in the milk. By the time the hint of spice from the chiles kicked in, I was already on my way to the trash can—though I kept the chips to eat on my subway ride home.
Who am I to judge Texas queso? I grew up on the other side of the country—in Connecticut, no less—and first became aware of queso relatively late in life, in college in New York, when a friend who was dating a girl from Austin spoke of it reverentially. I didn’t try it myself until 2012, when a new restaurant called Javelina opened in New York, near Union Square, purporting to offer authentic Tex-Mex cuisine to a city that has historically wanted for it. I found the food at Javelina, which just opened a second location, on the Upper East Side, to be generally good, though perhaps not great. But the queso—the queso was divine. It was irresistibly, uniformly thick and creamy, its expansive, mild cheesiness a perfect canvas for the heat of the chiles and for the salt on the freshly fried corn tortilla chips. Last summer, on my first trip to Texas, I watched a friend melt Velveeta in a Crock-Pot and add nothing but a generous squirt of sriracha; that, too, was fantastic.
And so I assumed that Chipotle had erred by attempting to complicate a dish that wants to be simple. But then I picked up a new cookbook by Lisa Fain, the woman behind a popular food blog called the Homesick Texan. The book, “Queso! Regional Recipes for the World’s Favorite Chile-Cheese Dip,” is a fascinating little volume, as much a cultural history of the state of Texas as a collection of recipes, dedicated to showing that queso is not nearly as simple as one might think. Velveeta-and-Ro-Tel purists, as it happens, are missing out on the dish’s surprising variety and versatility. In the book’s introduction, Fain explains that she grew up eating queso but didn’t consider it deeply until she moved to New York, where she discovered that it was hard to find Velveeta and Ro-Tel in a store, let alone queso in a restaurant; if she wanted to eat the dip, she would need to get creative. “As I researched recipes,” she writes, “I discovered there was a whole world beyond canned tomatoes and brick cheese.” On a friend’s tip, she went to El Paso during a visit home to Texas. There, and in the southern parts of neighboring New Mexico, she found an alternate universe of queso, “made with long green chiles and white melting cheese.”
Inspired, she decided to explore further, travelling all over the state and into Mexico digging into historical records. The first published recipe she tracked down was in an 1896 issue of an American magazine called The Land of Sunshine. It appeared, in an article about Mexican food, as “chiles verdes con queso” and was more chile- than cheese-centric, intended as a side dish as opposed to a dip. The dish’s evolution, Fain posits, had to do with the popularity of fondue and Welsh rabbit (a British dish, also known as Welsh rarebit, that consists of melted cheese, often seasoned, over toast) in the US in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, recipes for “Mexican rarebit,” which added chiles to the cheese, began to pop up; one, in the 1914 edition of Boston Cooking-School Magazine, Fain writes, “was very close to what most would consider American chile con queso today.” A recipe for Mexican rarebit in Fain’s book calls for yellow American cheese, which had become popular by the nineteen-twenties and melts easily, along with roasted Anaheim chiles, corn kernels, and Mexican lager. A few years later, the San Antonio Woman’s Club published the first recipe in Texas to use the name “chile con queso,” which recommended pouring it over toast.
In 1943, Ro-Tel tomatoes were born, and a few years later a Ro-Tel ad featured a recipe for making chile con queso with American cheese or a processed cheese such as Velveeta, which contains stabilizers that insure its consistency when melted. By the nineteen-fifties, Velveeta was flying off the shelves, and, in the eighties, Kraft and Ro-Tel joined forces for a marketing campaign, cementing their identity as the perfect pair, the brand-name faces of queso. But, while doing research for her book, Fain discovered quesos that use all kinds of cheese, from American to asadero, Muenster to Monterey Jack, queso fresco, and even panela, which doesn’t melt when heated, remaining in firm cubes for a dish called queso guisado, which is popular in parts of Mexico, Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and Houston. A chapter called “Quirky Quesos” includes two vegan recipes (made with raw cashews or vegan cheese), an Indian queso (coconut flakes, cumin, ground ginger), and a Greek queso from a restaurant in Houston, made with a very meltable Greek sheep’s-milk cheese and served with pita.
The recipes that most appealed to me were the ones that sounded like the quesos that first gave me a taste for the stuff. I made “Austin Diner-Style Queso,” which Fain introduces with a reference to a scene in Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” for a birthday gathering, using a stash of roasted and peeled Hatch chiles—a gift from a friend from New Mexico—that had been languishing in my freezer for months, instead of the Anaheims that the recipe called for, plus fresh jalapeños, butter, onion, cumin, and cayenne. The cheese was yellow American, shredded from a block I bought at Whole Foods. Thinned with a sort of roux of milk, cornstarch, and water, it quickly reached a perfect, creamy consistency. I had similar luck with “West Texas Green Chile Queso Blanco,” served at a Super Bowl party. I made a roux, melted a mixture of white American, Monterey Jack, and mild Cheddar, then added more of my frozen Hatch stash, plus a few jalapeños, broiled until blackened, steamed in a paper bag, and peeled.
Helen Hollyman told me that her ultimate queso is the Bob Armstrong Dip at an Austin restaurant called Matt’s El Rancho, which is all about the toppings: guacamole, “taco meat” (seasoned ground beef), and sour cream. There’s a recipe for it in Fain’s book, and it’s on the menu at Javelina, too. It’s “the most Liberace version of the dish,” Hollyman said. But she keeps a can of Ro-Tel in her New York apartment, and when I asked her what qualifies as authentic — or even just good — queso, she said, “Being inside the state lines somewhere, hovering over the kitchen counter, searching for that lost chip that fell into the whirlpool of its murky, velvety abyss. That, and if it runs like screaming-hot glue out of a glue gun.”
By 1964, queso had become such an emblem of Texas that Lady Bird Johnson’s recipe was published in the Washington Post. Her version, like Chipotle’s, was made with aged Cheddar cheese, “which is odd,” Fain writes in her book, “since American cheese was the chile con queso standard at the time.” Fain tested the recipe and found that the flavorings were “quite delicious” but the cheese posed a big problem: “without any dairy or starch to thin and emulsify the sauce, it turned into a disagreeable lump,” she writes, adding, “The White House chef at the time, René Verdon, had cruelly referred to the Johnson family’s favorite appetizer as ‘chile con concrete.’ ” Fain assumes that the Cheddar was an attempt to “make the dip seem more sophisticated.” Later recipes attributed to Mrs. Johnson, she notes, use processed cheese. # # #
[Hannah Goldfield is a contributing writer/food critic for The New Yorker. She also has contributed to The New York Times, Bloomberg News, New York magazine, Vogue, Grub Street, and The Cut. Goldfield received a BA (biological anthropology and creative writing) from Columbia University (NY).]
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