Ring In Week 10 Of Quarantine With Homemade Shake Shack Cheese Sauce
As we enter month three of sheltering in place, you deserve a bit of a pick-me-up. Enter an iconic provider of the necessary pick-me-up: Shake Shack. While many of its restaurants are currently closed, you can still get a taste of greasy fast food goodness at home. The national burger chain unveiled the recipe for its classic cheese sauce on its Twitter and Facebook pages and—get ready for a big shocker—it's mostly heavy cream. Here's the ingredient list:
- 1 Tbsp. canola oil
- ¾ cup onion
- 6 thin slices jalapeño
- ½ Tbsp. salt
- 2 Tbsp. peppercorns
- 1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
- 2 Tbsp. white wine
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 2 cups American cheese
- 2 cups cheddar cheese
Basically, you cook the onions, jalapeño, salt, and peppercorns in canola oil until they're translucent. Then add the white wine vinegar and white wine, and cook until it reduces down. Once it does, it's cream time, baby: add two whole cups of heavy cream, turn off the heat, and let it all steep for 30 minutes. After that, strain out the onions etc., and heat up your onion-steeped cream to almost a boil. Add the four whole cups of cheese and mix until smooth. My arteries clogged while writing this, in the best way. Now all you need are the crinkle fries, which sort of taste like the frozen store-bought ones, anyway.
This video is (allegedly) the first of a cooking-along series, "Shake Shack at Your Shack," which will unveil more of the "modern day roadside burger stand's" heretofore secret recipes. If we're locked down long enough for me to figure out how to make frozen custard at home, god help us all.