In The Kitchen- The Chef Trying to Save American Cheese

I LOVE American cheese, and I cannot stand the hate for it! It is absolutely perfect for Cheeseburgers, Tuna Melts, Grilled Cheeses, and so much more! And as much as I can easily just open up a Kraft singles and go to town, I can also admit that there is still room for improvement, and that’s where New School American Cheese from Chef Eric Greenspan comes into play!

Excerpts below, but the Full interview can heard on the podcast, LISTEN HERE, and available anywhere podcasts are found “Let Me Tell You Why…with Jeremy Jacobowitz”! In the full interview we dive deeper into what went into actually starting the business, the manufacturing process of the cheese, more into how you can try it, and his most iconic NYC Restaurants.

What do you love about American Cheese?

What don't I love about American cheese? You know, I mean, for me, it's obviously a combination of performance and nostalgia, right? Like, it reminds me of everything that I loved as a kid and as an immature adult. When I'm eating all of the grubby, like American style comfort food stuff, it's always better when it's, you know, grilled cheese, burgers, mac and cheese, it's always better with American cheese. And the creaminess, the meltiness, the stickiness. It's the only cheese that does what it does. It's a singular experience, American cheese. Love it leave it, it is a singularly unique experience.

What made you want to start New School?

It started when I was writing the great grilled cheese book, and I separated the book by chapters and each chapter was a different cheese, and I led with American cheese and I was like, let's put an American cheese recipe in there, right? And then I looked it up and I was like, God, that's gonna be pretty hard to get people to make American cheese at home when it's got phosphates and sorbic acid and, starches, and all this kind of stuff in it.

And it just kind of got me thinking that like these days, people think about the blend of their burgers, right? It's dry aged or it's a chuck brisket blend and stuff like that. You got people baking their own buns and you got people, you know, hand whisking their mayos, right? But then they put, you know, a slice of Kraft on it and call it a day because American cheese is the proper cheese for a burger, right? But they didn't really have any options. And so I kind of wanted to complete the cycle of quality. Like there's, you know, a burger is no longer just a burger to people, right? A burger has become a culinary expression. People are elevating American comfort food to levels that haven't been elevated before. And it really starts with quality ingredients, but there's never a quality American cheese. And then you look at, you know, you look at the product landscape and some of the brands that I've always really loved and respected.

And so for us, it was really important to not only be a cleaner, quote unquote, better for you brand, but to be a better tasting, a better performing brand as well, right? We wanted to take American cheese and make it not just better ingredients, but also, we wanted to taste better than the American cheese that was out there, we wanted to melt better than the American cheese that was out there, we took our time to make sure that we could do all of it, right? Be everything.

How would you compare it to a Kraft single? Yours is closer to the original American cheese?

American cheese kind of started here, right? And it was basically like a way to pasteurize cheddar cheese so that you can ship it without refrigeration and back 100 years ago when that stuff was kind of important. And then because of the sodium citrate in there, which is like the magic that kind of keeps it together, people started to realize, we don't really even need to put anything else real in it, and we can still do it. And so it kind of went down like that in terms of quality, we went up!

So instead of regular cheddar, we used aged cheddar. But like back in the day, they used to use butter and now they use oil and we use cream instead of water and things like that.

I think a Kraft single tastes, you know, very manufactured, right? American cheese to me has always been texture over flavor, right? Typically to me, the flavor always tasted like at least with Kraft, it always tasted a little off to me or just like, you know, like I said, a little bit, a little bit muted, let's say, right? But because we use aged cheddar, l wanted you to taste the cheese. I wanted it to taste natural.

The only, what you would consider a non-natural ingredient, and it's arguable that it is, is sodium citrate, right? Which is just a salt. That's why we went with the aged cheddar route. Like, we wanted it to be flavor-forward.

For people that want to try it, do you have any standout restaurants using it in a really great way?

In New York, I'd say my two favorite places serving it right now is the Hoexter's Burger, that place is so cool, I love that place! And you know the Reveille Luncheonette? Yeah, the the Patty Melt there. Those are probably two of my favorites. Outside of New York, Mei Lin at Daybird melts it on her fish sandwich with that caviar tartar sauce that she does. (in LA)

What is something unexpected that American cheese works well on?

I think the weirdest thing that I had it in was ramen. Have you ever done American cheese and ramen? Cheesy ramen is crazy good where you just kind of put a slice of cheese like on top of the noodles in the middle and then you just kind of slowly fold it in to it. And like because it's got flavor to it, like it stands up to kind of all of the umami and all the stuff that's going on. That's been a really fun use for it.

Anything you can say about the Tesla Diner in LA and your association?

I don't have a comment about that. I'm sure there is something happening at the Tesla Diner, but I certainly can't comment on it.