You can add sodium citrate to any cheese to make it stay together when melting. In fact you can melt several decent cheeses together, like gruyere and cheddar, add a gram of sodium citrate per ounce of cheese, melt, and pour it on a wax paper lined tray to make your own single slice cheese. For nacho sauce add water or beer to thin it down.
Consider trying other American Process Cheese brands -- e.g. Boar's Head -- that offer the same American Cheese singles, but are of a slightly higher quality.
American cheese on burgers is fantastic, but there's definitely a gradient in the quality of the different American cheese products.
Yeah, after a long stretch of trying "proper" cheeses on burgers, I've gone back to using Kraft singles. Even Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends American cheese for burgers, so I don't feel so bad about it.
I much prefer a mature cheddar. In particular an apple smoked cheddar.
A close second would be a blue cheese such as St. Agur.
Both with a lot of umami goodness on the burger.
I will happily eat a burger with American cheese. It is good - but not cheese to me. It is more an oily softness than the smooth fatty softness from (dare I say real) cheese.
Maybe this comes from growing up where a "cheese shop" actually is a thing :-)
But cheese fries with american cheese are truly sinful and a very guilty pleasure. They're not common around here for which my heart is eternally thankful!
I do both cheddar and blue/gorgonzola on the same burger and it works pretty well. We sometimes add chopped green olives and cream cheese and it makes for an absolutely sublime cheeseburger.
