No, it is NOT margarine, not by a long shot. Margarine is a non-dairy spread of oil that attempts to masquerade as a butter-like substance. American cheese, on the other hand, is cheese. Even the bastardized corruptions known as “cheese food” and “cheese product” normally contain some percentage of actual cheese.
While you may substitute it for mayonnaise, that does not make it margarine or mayo.
Hence I said “general rule” and not “immutable law of nature”.
You can purchase American cheese slices individually wrapped but you don’t have to - in contrast to cheese food and cheese product slices which don’t remain slices without a wrapper around them.
I don’t have any idea why you think it’s a general rule when American cheese is ridiculously easy to find individually wrapped. It’s not like I’m pointing out a rarity.
You should spend four hours every day in the cheese aisle at the supermarket. Anyone so much as looks at Kraft Singles, and you can sigh and utter a “feh.” Bonus points if you go to a more upscale supermarket and hide all the Kraft behind the box wine (or is that cool now?).
American cheese from the deli is a LOT better than Kraft Singles. It’s a nice, creamy mild cheddar that tastes great on sandwiches. It’s basically freshly sliced and then wrapped in paper, just like lunch meat.
If you try to “age” it, I’m guessing you’ll just end up with moldy cheese.
My dad did accidentally “age” some Kraft cheddar he bought – it might have been Cracker Barrel. It somehow got moved to the back of the fridge and because our fridge was so full, it ended up back there for three years. It was the sealed package, so it didn’t go moldy, but it was extra sharp. Totally delicious. I don’t know if that counts.
Read the labels again. I’m willing to bet most of what you see as American cheese in individual wrappers is actually that cheese food or cheese product stuff.
Actual cheese in individual wrapped slices isn’t unknown but at least in my neck of the woods it’s quite uncommon.
Wow this whole issue is just so much more confusing than I thought.
So… there is a thing known as American Cheese, that you can ask for in the deli, and they will slice it for you. But even this is not a “true” cheese in some sense, in that it is actually a product of cheese and milk mixed together (am I right so far?). But there is also stuff labeled “American Cheese”, always individually wrapped, that is actually a processed cheese food product, that has even more milk processed in, and hence less flavor.
But at the end of the day, American Cheese is always a processed cheese, right?
American Cheese is not cheese, and doesn’t need to contain any cheese. It is made from wet and/or dry milk products such as whey or milk protein mixed with milk fat and water.
Yo, Tripolar = got a cite for that claim? Because the US has laws about mislabeling food, and American cheese most certainly is cheese, even if foodies turn their noses up at it.
Generally no longer made from blended cheeses… but some American cheese you buy may be real cheese in the sense that is made from blended cheeses and other dairy products.
So is the Kraft Deluxe made from a real blend of actual cheeses and other dairy products, but the regular “American singles” or whatever really have absolutely no cheese in them at all?
That information from Wikipedia is not accurate. Processed cheese and cheese food must be made from real cheese. The US regulations on “pasteurized process cheese” can be found here at §133.169, and the regulations for “pasteurized process cheese food” can be found here at §133.173.
Something made from “a set of ingredients such as milk, whey, milkfat, milk protein concentrate, whey protein concentrate, and salt” (but no cheese) would be imitation cheese, and probably couldn’t even be labeled “cheese product,” since it isn’t a product made from cheese, even though there’s no legal regulation that I could find of the specific term “cheese product.” “American singles” also isn’t regulated specifically as far as I can tell, and could presumably be used to label anything produced in America, since it doesn’t have any other intrinsic meaning that I can see.
I think people in the thread that said American cheese was needed to make a “proper grilled cheese sandwich” can keep their snooty card and people like me, who pointed out that there are other ways to make a proper grilled cheese, get to make snide comments about your snooty cards while secretly wanting one of our own.
Thanks for the replies…what exactly is that USDA “cheese” (that is given out in large blocks)? Is it cheese or “cheese food”? Also, I’m told that al lot of cheap pizza chains don’t use real mozzarella cheese-they se something made from lard and milk powder-is this correct?
There is in fact such a thing as “real” American cheese, made as a cheese, not a processed "cheese food: or as a blending of other cheeses. I could direct you to two sites in Upstate New York where it is still made (in Sodus and Colosse), and I believe there are still others. You are right that many major brand names prefer to market something that is blended or processed. When I was a kid there was a ‘cheese factory’ (meaning a cottage industry in this usage, not an industrial plant) in Rodman NY which had been poducing American cheese direct from the milk of local dairies for all of my grandmother’s 75 years (she was born within 4 miles of it), but it has long since closed.
Further, you can in fact get a sharp Americxan cheese that is distinct from cheddar in a difficut-to-define way, but let me analogize it to the difference between drinking whole milk(sharp cheddar) and drinking 2% milk (sharp American). We can actually buy it at the Food Lion here in small-town North Carolina – you just have to be looking for it.
