Cheeseburger

A square of orange-white cheese leaves a plant in Heimenkirch, a village in the Bavarian Allgäu, and ends up on a German McDonald's Cheeseburger. McDonald's Deutschland names Hochland, a family-owned dairy firm based there, as the maker of the Cheddar-style Schmelzkäse for its Cheeseburger and the Hamburger Royal Cheese. The slice is the one component of the German version that has a documented German address. Everything else on the bun is a short, familiar list: a thin griddled beef patty, ketchup, mustard, onion, a single pickle. The cheese carries the order, which is why asking for a Cheeseburger at a German counter is a request for that slice and what it does to the patty underneath.

What it does is melt without breaking. Schmelzkäse is made by heating cheese with emulsifying salts until it sets as a smooth, uniform mass, and a slice laid on a hot patty slumps at the corners, softens through the middle and tacks itself to the beef instead of sliding off or weeping oil. Unwrap a Cheeseburger in the car and the paper is warm and slightly damp, the cheese has gone glossy and gummy at the edges, and the first bite is mostly soft bun and salt with the pickle cutting in sour a moment later. The patty is thin enough that the cheese and the bread do most of the chewing, and the mustard puts a sharp edge under the sweetness of the ketchup.

The slice also explains why the build has barely moved. Nothing about a Cheeseburger needs a new station or a second sauce, so the kitchen can assemble one in the time it takes to lay a patty down, and the Doppel-Cheeseburger is the same stack with another patty and another slice. The melt is the engineering, and it has a failure window. A slice put on too early slides off a wet patty; a slice added after the meat leaves the heat stays a cold, rubbery square and the burger reads as a hamburger with a mistake in it. Bun, patty and cheese reach the paper within seconds of each other so that the heat of the beef is still available to the cheese.

German eaters already knew the material. Schmelzkäse in foil-wrapped triangles and in sandwich slices sits in nearly every German fridge, spread on bread for the evening Abendbrot and melted over toast, so a processed slice on a burger arrives with no strangeness attached. That familiarity helps explain a figure that surprises visitors: de.wikipedia lists the Cheeseburger as McDonald's best-selling product in Germany, ahead of the Chickenburger and the Big Mac. Sales data by item are not published in detail, so the ranking rests on that listing.

Outside the chain, the Cheeseburger turns up at the Imbiss and in the burger restaurants that opened across German cities, usually with the slice swapped for Gouda, a sharper Cheddar, or Bergkäse, and with a brioche bun in place of the soft one. Those versions melt differently and eat differently, firmer and more savory, with the cheese held in stringy sheets and not fused to the meat. The chain version, with its processed slice and warm paper, remains the reference most Germans mean when they say the word.

Heimenkirch, 1973

McDonald's opened in West Germany in 1971, and no record names a German originator for its Cheeseburger, an American format on a German menu. The earliest dated fact about its German character comes two years later. According to McDonald's Deutschland, Hochland has supplied the chain's cheese since 1973, which puts an Allgäu dairy behind the German version almost from the start.

The scale grew with the chain. McDonald's Deutschland's supplier portrait of Hochland describes a clean room and a purpose-built machine that rolls the cheese mass out into a thin web and cuts it into slices, and a 2016 trade report put Hochland's output for McDonald's at more than 500 million slices a year. Treat that number as a 2015 figure, since it has not been reissued with a current year, but it indicates how many German Cheeseburgers, Royal Cheeses and Doppel-Cheeseburgers go out with a Heimenkirch slice on top.

The slice itself is cut and stacked at the dairy, delivered to restaurants across the country, and laid on the patty in the last seconds before the bun closes. Each Cheeseburger sold in a German McDonald's carries a piece of that 1973 arrangement, and the Cheeseburger's place at the top of the sales list means it is the sandwich through which most of those slices travel.