[tptacek]

Hershey's chocolate is pretty bad, and American cheese is barely cheese. But both have functional properties that make them desirable for some applications: it's difficult to make a truly good cheeseburger without American cheese because of its melting properties, for instance. That's also why people use it in grilled cheeses, although it's less essential there (swiss melts just fine on a sandwich, for instance), and you should at the very least probably add some shredded cheddar or something to your American in a grilled cheese.

You can add American's functional properties to almost any cheese with sodium citrate powder (we make and slice up baking sheets worth of "Americanized" aged cheddars, gruyere, and even blue).

I would not confuse these useful properties with goodness. Grapeseed oil is also extremely useful. But California olive oil is a better oil. American cheese is like the grapeseed of cheese.

[magduf]

>it's difficult to make a truly good cheeseburger without American cheese because of its melting properties, for instance

Huh? On non-fast-food cheeseburgers, cheddar is typically the standard cheese, and swiss is also popular. One of the best burgers I ever ate had caramelized goat cheese (in Europe). I don't even know the last time I had American cheese (on a burger or anything else), and I'm pretty sure the cheeses I've had on burgers were not "Americanized" as you mention, they were just normal cheese.

[tptacek]

People like a lot of "burgers" that are barely burgers by the classic definition. Every once in awhile, I like a pub burger with all sorts of random stuff on it too. But those burgers are to "cheeseburgers" what Chicago pizza is to "pizza".

There is a reason that the nationally-famous burgers at Au Cheval in Chicago, Hog & Hominy in Memphis, Holeman & Fitch in Atlanta, Shake Shack in NYC, Husk in Charleston, and probably a bunch of other destination burgers all use American, despite many of these places being sit-down establishments.

[magduf]

>There is a reason that the nationally-famous burgers at Au Cheval in Chicago, Hog & Hominy in Memphis, Holeman & Fitch in Atlanta, Shake Shack in NYC, Husk in Charleston, and probably a bunch of other destination burgers all use American, despite many of these places being sit-down establishments.

And what is that reason? We have Shake Shack here in DC, and the reason there is pretty obvious: Shake Shack is fast food. It's a tier higher than Five Guys, and two or three tiers higher than McDonald's, but it's still fast-food, and their burgers do not cost $12-15 like in nice restaurants, so of course they're going to use cheap cheese. As for those other places, I've never heard of them.

Maybe I'm just weird, because I generally consider fast food to be inedible, so I really don't pay much attention to chains like that. Shake Shack is probably the cheapest type of restaurant I would ever eat at, and that's pretty rare. I make enough money to eat good food.

[tptacek]

Shake Shack --- at least the original --- is an internationally recognized excellent burger. But leave it aside, if you want, as a chain. The other burgers are celebrity, destination burgers; "make arrangements well in advance to get them" burgers (though you can get Au Cheval's burger easily at Small Cheval now).

American cheese is the standard, at the high end and the low end, for burgers that aren't eaten with a knife and fork. The reason is that it has superior functional properties to other cheeses: it remains emulsified when melted, and easily melts completely.

At this point, I'd probably just send to you J. Kenji Lopez-Alt if you want to read more about the virtues of American cheese. It's useful stuff. Ironically, though, I'm here in the thread to talk it down as "cheese". It's a good product. It's not good cheese.

[rayiner]

What makes Hershey’s chocolate bad? A Hershey’s bar with almonds is pretty much as good as it gets chocolate wise. Certainly better to my palate than the fancy high cacao chocolate that is trendy these days.

[tptacek]

You like what you like. You can go read any number of blind taste tests, or any of a million Reddit threads where it is tediously re-explained that the sour milk note in the stabilizers Hershey's grosses Europeans out, or the NYT's notes about how bitter their cocoa is, but really it's just commodity chocolate whose overwhelming characteristic is sweetness with almost no texture or anything of interest to recommend it.

If you're looking for something to serve an almost functional role in a product, like a S'more or whatever, it's... fine? Do you bake with Hershey's? Like in a brownie, where you can dial the sweetness in instead of swinging it all the way to 11?

I don't think there's anything wrong with liking Hershey's chocolate, and I myself like American cheese! I'm just saying they're objectively not as good as other products, and the people who point that out aren't wrong to do so. Honestly, I think most people who say Hershey's is good would prefer Cadbury's.

[magduf]

You should try some German or Swiss chocolate. Ritter Sport (German) is very good and not costly (and not high-cacao either).