Quick-and-Easy Homemade Cheese Sauce (Gluten-Free Recipe)

With only 2 days left before Thanksgiving, it's time to think about how to take advantage of the summer's bounty for your holiday feast. While:

• roasted turkey
• mashed potatoes and gravy
• green bean casserole
• cranberry sauce
• and homemade dinner rolls

are traditional American Thanksgiving classics, when you're gluten free, you have to come up with creative alternatives to other side dishes, as well.
The trick in making something extra-special and worthy to sit on your gluten-free Thanksgiving table is to take something ordinary like steamed asparagus or broccoli and add something extra.

In our family, that's often a rich, homemade, gluten-free cheese sauce.

How Do You Add Color and Pizzazz to Your Dinner Table?

Vegetables have always been the least adorned member on our dinner table or Thanksgiving spread. Most of my attention has always gone into the spicy, crumb-topped sweet potatoes and fruit salad fluffy stuff I like to make for the holidays.

However, this year, we're doing something different.

With Covid-19 heating up again in our area, my oldest son has decided not to cook Thanksgiving dinner for extended family any more. That means there's just going to be the 2 of us at our Thanksgiving feasts from now on.

Ordinarily, I don't go to extremes cooking Thanksgiving dinner any more. I did that once after most of the kids had moved out, before I was gluten free. I quickly learned that it wasn't worth the time, effort, and all of that leftover food for a 20-minute visit with the kids.

After inhaling one single plateful of classic Thanksgiving dishes, the boys were off and running, focused on something more important to them, so I never made an extra-large Thanksgiving meal again.

Instead, I've looked for quick-and-easy ways to add color and pizzazz to our holiday meals, while keeping the number of dishes served down to a minimum.

Now that we're gluten free, I've discovered that it's even more important not to overdo it on the holidays.

While I do like to serve special dishes and treats that we don't ordinarily eat year-round, I've been rethinking that attitude over the past couple of years.

Learning to cook gluten free is a trial-and-error process, and if you were a foodie or a professional cook, like I was before going gluten free, you'll find yourself working with a single recipe over and over again until it reaches the state of perfection.

For that reason, our gluten-free recipe file isn't very full yet. 

Finding a Suitable Thickener for Gluten-Free American Cheese Sauce

Traditional cheese sauce is made from a roux.

A roux is pretty simple to make. All you do is melt some type of fat, usually butter, and then mix in as much all-purpose flour as the amount of fat will hold.

When gluten free, you can't use all-purpose flour anymore, so you have to come up with a safe thickener that won't go gummy.

In my experience, tapioca starch and potato starch do not make good substitutes for flour in sauces.

Rice flour doesn't either.

Although some gluten-free cooks do use rice flour or their favorite gluten-free flour mix to thicken sauces, I haven't had good luck with rice flour based thickeners. The sauce just doesn't thicken up for me. At least, not in normal flour-to-liquid proportions.

I haven't tried potato flour yet, although I've heard good things about it.

I normally use Argo corn starch in the yellow plastic container because it's the one brand I know is gluten free, and I always have it in the house. It's quick and simple to use.

For some sauces like gravies, it does produce a different look and texture than traditional sauces and gravies provide, but for a smooth and silky American Cheese Sauce, I haven't noticed a difference.

Corn starch also lets me leave out the butter, when necessary, which is important for those times when I'm not absorbing fats very well.

The biggest problem with corn starch is that very few brands are gluten free. Most manufacturers produce corn starch on shared machinery. For more information about that, you can check out our blog post on how to make gluten-free flour.

The Cheese You Use Gives Different Results

For a while, I was using hard cheeses in my sauces. We didn't have a good economical source of real American Cheese, the kind that isn't individually wrapped.

All that was available in our area was the super-soft, easy-to-melt, plastic cheese foods I don't do well with due to the amount of milk that is in each slice.

Dairy products are extremely touchy for me.

I can only use high-quality, low-lactose dairy products, and even then, I sometimes react to certain brands if they are processed in shared facilities or have stabilizers in the milk.

This is a common problem for celiacs because the enzymes needed to digest lactose come from the tips of the villi, which become blunted when glutened, even by tiny residues.

Therefore, any accidental glutening or continuous ingestion of gluten residue, even at extremely low levels, can cause me to react to dairy products.

Currently, we use American Cheese from our local Costco. It makes a super-smooth orange cheese sauce instead of the extra-thick gritty sauce that hard cheeses produce.

However, if you're on a whole-foods diet and not particularly sensitive to the amount of milk in cheese, any type of real cheese will work in this sauce, even cream cheese, if that's what you have.

Fresh Parmesan is also an option.

Parmesan will make the sauce a bit stretchy and stringy, due to the nature of the cheese, so ladling it over your vegetables can be a bit tricky.

Dried Parmesan, on the other hand, will give you a thick, gritty texture, the same texture that you would get in an Alfredo sauce made with dried cheese, but that's the type of parmesan that hubby prefers.

Other Liquids and Ideas for Dairy Free or Low-Carb Diets

Cheese sauce is normally made with milk, but it doesn't have to be. While I've never tried to make this sauce with dairy-free cheese alternatives, the sauce works well when made with coconut milk instead of cow's milk.

Just omit the butter and use less corn starch for thickening.

When I was completely dairy free, I added one or more of the following:

• bacon pieces, including some of the fat
• minced jalapeno and red peppers
• chopped tomatoes
• fresh minced herbs like basil or rosemary
• chopped green chilies
• sliced mushrooms
• minced celery
• or sliced hard-boiled eggs

That made the sauce different each time I made it and hid the taste of the coconut milk. Even a few chopped pecans would kick this up a notch for a holiday meal or special occasion.

Alternatively, you could skip the milk completely and just use orange juice or pineapple juice along with a little added sugar or other sweetener. Not a cheese sauce that way, but it would still be a great sauce to serve over vegetables.

You could perk up the flavor even more with grated orange peel, pure vanilla, and crushed pineapple. A pinch of dried hot chili peppers adds a special kick to fruit sauces, as will:

• allspice
• dried cranberries
• minced garlic
• and chives

Those on low-carb diets can use extra-thick heavy cream and some cream cheese to replace the milk. Heavy cream is also lower in lactose than milk, so it would be a better choice for those who are lactose intolerant.

You wouldn't need to use any corn starch that way, especially if you toss in the cream cheese, as well.

And don't limit yourself to just cheese.

Go ahead and toss in some:

• bacon
• minced pepperoni
• jalapeno slices
• chopped or sliced olives
• or sliced green onions

For a festive look, layer your steamed asparagus in a nice bake dish, top with the cheese sauce, and then sprinkle it with crushed pork rinds and green onions for added color. If pork rinds are not your thing, just leave them off.

My Gluten-Free Homemade Cheese Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of milk, heavy cream, coconut milk, or juice
• 1-2 tablespoons of cornstarch, depending on how thick you want it
• 2 tablespoons butter or bacon fat (optional)
• 6 to 12 slices American cheese (or spices if using juice)

In a medium-sized saucepan, combine milk and corn starch. Whisk with a wire whisk until nice and smooth. Heat slowly over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Lower the heat.

Add butter or bacon fat and stir until it melts into the sauce completely. Tear your cheese into 4 or 5 pieces per slice and drop them into the sauce. Continue to stir the sauce until the cheese is completely melted and the sauce is nice and smooth.

Six slices of American cheese will give you a slight cheesy flavor. This would be a good choice if you were going to add other goodies and didn't want the cheese to overpower the other ingredients. 

Twelve slices of American cheese will give you maximum flavor and carry its own against strong ingredients like bacon and jalapeno.