A word about cheese.

Speaking of enchilada cheese -

When I was living in the UK, I learned to make a lot of Tex-Mex myself. While most of the large chain groceries like Tesco and Sainsbury's carry the full line of Old El Paso products, somehow that just didn't quite cut it. Hence the sauce recipe below. I was able to pretty well replicate most of my favorites from home: salsas, refried beans, beef tacos, even my Stella's Famous Guacamole (thanks to those famous Israeli avocados).

But one thing was always missing, and from my favorite dish: cheese.

You can't make cheese enchiladas with cheddar. Well, you can make a heavily cheesy pile of carbohydrates that the English might be fooled by, but you cannot replicate real cheese enchiladas. So I expanded my repertoire of fillings. I tried Cheddar, Cheshire, Gloucester, , Leicester, Five Counties - even Stilton. I realized it wasn't so much the flavor that was off as it was the texture, and, more specifically, the meltability. So I searched even further afield. Mozzarella was obvious, but the result was decidedly un-Mexican in flavor. Gruyère - shockingly - was the best. It was melty to begin with! So I then tried mixing gruyère with cheddar. The result was a tasty mountain of cheese - but in no way resembled cheese enchiladas.

Finally, in desperation, I clandestinely smuggled a Kennedy-family-sized log of Velveeta into the country. At least the stuff melts, right? It looked great. I even took a photograph of my first Velveeta-based attempt at a plate of cheese enchiladas, intending to email it to my parents as proof that, despite the tiny refrigerators and lack of religion, England wasn't such a dismal place, after all. I pulled the plate toward me and hungrily attacked the first of four rolls of the delicacy. It looked right, it smelled right... but it was so, so wrong.

Velveeta isn't cheese.

Later, I found out that a lot of old school Tex-Mex places use another processed cheese - apparently it's some sort of food industry secret, but I hear it's made by Land O Lakes and is only available to wholesale restaurant buyers. I guess it's like the Lexus of processed American cheese product. It's like upper class Velveeta.

Anyway, I never mastered the cheese enchilada the whole time I was in the UK, much to my shame and disappointment.

There's a great related article by my favorite Texpert, Robb Walsh, a food writer for the Houston Chronicle, here.