Cheesy, gooey, a little bit spicy: this is truly the ideal food for days on end at home.

This queso recipe is slightly adapted from a recipe by Homesick Texan. My brother and I made this recipe, but because we aren’t good chefs and we did not have all the ingredients, we had to improvise. Our improvisations are in parentheses.

Ingredients:

  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (Use salted butter. Love yourself.)
  • 1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
  • 3 Serrano chiles, seeded and diced (We didn’t have either one of the two types of peppers, so we used canned diced, fire-roasted green chiles. If you use canned, drain off a little bit of the juice before you put it in the pan. To make up for some of the missing heat, we served the queso with a TON of Cholula hot sauce, and added extra spices.)
  • 3 jalapeños, seeded and diced (See above.)
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 1 cup milk
  • 6 cups hand-shredded cheese, can use any combination of Longhorn cheddar and Monterrey Jack (Pre-shredded cheese has fillers in it that make it melt weird, so hand-shredded is very important. A delicious cheese choice would be pepper jack, but we did sharp cheddar and Colby jack.)
  • 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
  • 2 plum tomatoes, peeled and diced (We used canned tomatoes and they worked out just fine!)
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin (We ended up doing about a teaspoon and a half of a mix of spices, because of the aforementioned Pepper Situation. Cumin, cayenne, garlic powder, and chili powder are all good choices.)
  • Salt, to taste

Directions:

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan on medium-low heat, and then cook the onions and peppers for about 5 minutes or until onions are translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

  2. Whisk the flour into the butter and vegetable mix then cook for about 30 seconds. (This timing is not as urgent as it sounds. Take your time!)
  3. Add the milk to the pot, and then cook on medium, whisking constantly until sauce is thick about 5 minutes. Stir in the cilantro and tomatoes.
  4. Turn the heat down to low, and a 1/4-cup at a time, slowly add the shredded cheese stirring into the white sauce until completely melted. Repeat until all the cheese has been added.
  5. Stir in the sour cream and cumin, then add salt to taste.

We then let it simmer for about 30 minutes while we made the rest of our dinner. This made it really thick and allowed all the flavors to blend really nicely.

This makes 19 servings. We halved the recipe which was enough for appetizer-sized servings for our quaran-team of four people. I ate it with tortilla chips, but my brother put it on his quesadilla, which could possibly kill you. But what a way to go!

Header via me!