I love salsa and cheese dip or the aptly named salsa con queso and decimate several loaves of Velveeta annually creating this magnus opus of chip toppings. But the one failing of this East-meets-West culinary paragon is that it doesn’t store well, turning into a form of cheesy cement that doesn’t reheat well. But magically, the store-bought stuff can happily sit on either countertop or refrigerator shelf maintaining its always dippable texture due to some dark deal a food-scientist made with Satan to defy food physics. I must make my own.
Reading the ingredients list, the storebought dip large consisted of cheese parts (whey, lecithin, squirrel) and a few chemical stabilizers, oils, fats, actual cheese (holy crap) and the always present maltodextrin. Knowing I could create dextrin from baking corn starch and isolate the requisite sodium salts from other household goods I set to work. I melted the Velveeta and set about adding the various meth-lab reductions to prevent the Velveeta from hardening at room temperature while reducing the salsa after a bath in some decade-old molecular sieves. Final step: Create an solute of oil and Velveeta to reduce the melting point. So, I melted and mixed. And mixed, and mixed and mixed. So looks like, despite the fact that Velveeta is 62.5% fat, it won’t dissolve into oil. So, I have what looks like amazing nacho dip, with this puddle of greasy spittle floating on top of it like tard-drool on a math test. I went so far as to add a small amount of rendered lard as an emulsifier and put it in a blender and once again the non-emulsion laughed at me wearing a hat of corn oil. I tried some, and it tasted like it looked, really good nacho dip that had just gotten into a baby-oil soaked girl-on-girl cat fight. Our dog Max loves the stuff.