3 Easy Steps to Fix Grainy Cheese

Holidays are an exciting time – melted cheese and gravy make these times saucier! But what happens if your sauce is grainy? Sometimes your sauce might break regardless of how attentive you are. It can get quite frustrating and discouraging, especially if you have guests over. Like other kitchen nightmares, sauces can be hard to tackle at home. Making home-made sauce comes with inherent risks: What if your Alfredo breaks? Instead of a grainy curdle-filled mess, you want a velvety, smooth texture.

To make things easier for you, we’ll reveal three steps to fix grainy and lumpy sauce. If you’re looking for foolproof methods to create the perfect sauce, you’ll want to read this. But before we can fix something, we need to understand it.

Table of Contents

Why Do Home-Made Sauces Curdle?

Dairy contains three main components: Protein, fats, and water. Curdling occurs when the proteins in a sauce devolve and bind together, causing them to separate from the water and tighten up into curds.

Dairy or egg-based sauces can curdle for several reasons:

  • There might not be enough fat in the sauce; skim milk often curdles much more quickly than fattier dairy products.
  • High heat can also cause your sauce to curdle; low and slow is the ideal option. It would help if you never boiled a dairy-based sauce. If you’re making a sauce with egg yolks, such as hollandaise, try making it over a double boiler for safety.
  • Dairy sauces often curdle with the addition of acid. You might have probably used this to your advantage before: It’s how we make delicious cheeses like ricotta and paneer. However, it’s not the texture you want for your yogurt or cream sauce. So, be sure to fully reduce anything acidic (like wine) before adding your dairy ingredient.
  • Add the egg yolks or dairy to your creamy sauce gradually, and add them last. If you’re anxious, you can try tempering the milk by whisking the hot ingredients into the dairy, and then slowly whisk that mixture back into the saucepan.
  • Salt can also cause curdling, so wait to season your sauce until the last second.
  • If you’re paranoid about the risks of curdling, consider adding a starchy agent to your sauce. You can dissolve cornstarch in water or make a simple roux, then follow the recipe from there.
  • Cheese sauce can add flavor to dishes from the classic mac and cheese to the Scallops Mornay. If your sauce curdles or becomes grainy, it can ruin the dish. Prevent your sauce from separating by grating your cheese as finely as possible. You can also add a starch — such as flour— to the cheese before melting it.

Even if your sauce starts to curdle, you may still be able to save it. Here’s how you can fix grainy sauce:

Step by Step Guide

Step 1

Remove your sauce from the stove immediately. The cheese begins to separate at 160 degrees Fahrenheit; high heat will cause your sauce to curdle. After you remove the saucepan from the stove, the residual heat will continue to separate the cheese sauce, so pour your sauce into another pan.

Step 2

Whisk a spoonful of lemon juice into your sauce. Curdling occurs when excessive heat causes the milk proteins in the sauce to separate from the cheese. The acid component in lemon juice interferes with the separation and detangles the protein molecules.

Step 3

If you don’t have freshly-squeezed lemon juice on hand, mix a few spoonfuls of cream. The fat in thick cream stabilizes the sauce, and the lower temperature of the frozen cream helps bring the sauce’s temperature below the curdling point. Don’t add too much thick cream because it can affect the texture and flavor of the sauce.

Pro tip:  Adding white wine instead of freshly-squeezed lemon juice to the sauce can also stop it from curdling.  

Be warned: Avoid adding both lemon juice and cream to your sauce; the acid in the juice can react with the cream and make your problem worse.

The Melted Cheese Dilemma

If you melt a semi-firm cheese like Gruyère, Jack, Jarlsberg, or the low-moisture mozzarella, it will throw a tantrum, turning into a sauce of stringy clumps surrounded by oil. So how can you make a velvety, luscious cheese sauce while avoiding “The Melted Cheese Dilemma”? Here are my favorite tips to help you succeed:

1. 50% of the cheese must be American cheese

You can’t skip American cheese. We tried—and it didn’t work. In my first queso attempts, I used equal parts Cheddar and Jack with no processed cheese. At room temperature, cheeses like Monterey Jack or Cheddar are a stable emulsion of dairy, water, and fat, held together by proteins. But when excessive heat is applied, the protein network falls apart, and the emulsion breaks. That’s when the fat globules come together to form a greasy pool, and the proteins congeal to create a grainy mess. But American cheese is easy to melt and nearly impossible to break. Try swapping out half of the cheese and replace it with American. You’ll be able to build a stable buffer so that the rest of the cheese can melt without fat separation.

You can also use a combo of semi-firm melting cheeses instead of Jack. These include low-moisture Mozzarella, Fontina, Comté, Gruyère, Manchega. However, it would help if you always kept the American cheese in there. It provides a smooth texture (and color); the other 50% of the cheese can bring the flavor and the stretchy pull.

2. Don’t skip the cornstarch

The second tip to keeping the cheese emulsion stable is using cornstarch. Firstly, the starch absorbs water and therefore thickens the sauce. It provides body and structure making it less like a watery dressing and more like a dip. More importantly, it prevents the fat and the proteins from mixing to form separate groups of grease (fat) and grainy clumps (proteins). In other words, the starch helps maintain the precariously balanced structure of room-temperature cheese, even when things are getting hot.

There are other ways to make a velvety, smooth cheese sauce. Some recipes call for a béchamel, others suggest using evaporated milk, and some go all-in on Velveeta or American jar.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you smooth grainy cheese sauce?

Rule of Thumb: Add cheese gradually after a sauce has thickened, stir it constantly, use the lowest heat, and remove from the heat the instant your cheese melts — but if your sauce is bubbling before you add the cheese, pull the saucepan off the heat altogether, add the cheese last, and stir until smooth.

 Why is the Roux grainy?

Once the butter has melted, add some flour and stir until smooth. Covering the flour with fat prevents it from forming grainy lumps when mixed with a liquid. Cook roux over low heat and stir constantly to stop curdling. High heat will burn down a roux, making it stringy and off-tasting.

Can you fix curdled sauce?

If a dairy-based cheese sauce curdles, immediately stop the cooking process. Take your pot off the heat and cover it in an ice bath. We recommend adding an ice cube to your sauce to ensure it cools down. If there are fewer clumps, you can quickly pour the whole sauce using a sieve.

How do you fix grainy white sauce?

If your bechamel sauce is turning grainy while cooking, add ice-cold water in place of the next splash of milk and whisk – it’ ll magically sort out the grains!

Why does my sauce taste gritty?

When you make the roux, you must add your cheese while adding milk to the heated mixture. Adding cheese slowly to a bubbling mixture may cause the cheese to break down. The coagulants and emulsifiers break down due to heat, thus causing a gritty texture.

How do I add flour without clumping?

Dissolve the flour in a pan by stirring it with an equal amount of fat, such as margarine, melted butter, or meat drippings. Dissolve the flour before mixing it with milk to prevent the starch from forming lumps

Why does the cornflour go lumpy?

You need to add cold water to your corn starch to make a slurry, which will help eliminate lumps. You may also want to consider making a roux in your pan first and then adding liquid. As a result, the sauce will thicken without clumps. Use a small amount of water for mixing.

What ingredients are in a cheese sauce?

The cheese sauce is one of the easiest sauces to make and requires four ingredients: butter, milk, flour, and cheese. Plus, you can throw some salt, cayenne, and pepper to jazz up the flavor.

What is fake nacho cheese?

Ricos consider themselves, the “sole originators of concession nachos.” They also call their product “a ready-to-serve, aseptically processed jalapeño, and cheddar cheese sauce.” The ingredients include modified food starch, cheese whey, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, Cheddar cheese, jalapeño peppers, salt, and sodium phosphate.

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