I love macaroni and cheese and am always trying new tricks in my quest for the perfect plate of goo. I use the white-sauce method (as opposed to the eggs-and-evaporated-milk method, which frightens me) and my cheese is sharp Cheddar. Sometimes I saute some onion in the butter before making the roux, and sometimes I add peas or ham. I like baked mac-n-cheese, but the sauce always seems to break and get grainy so I usually skip the baking. I am not happy with my macaroni and cheese at the moment.
So: roux or custard? Cheese varieties? Other additives? To bake or not to bake? Breadcrumbs? This is a profound topic.
And just to curtail the inevitable:
Quote:
Originally Posted by everyone, but probably mostly boys
I do the white sauce version, too, and I don't bake because I am afraid of squishy pasta.
And I usually use just sharp cheddar, but I will sometimes add other cheese. Brie rocks mac and cheese so much it's crazy, and just a little bit of blue cheese or gorgonzola is good, if you use a small enough amount that you can't really put your finger on it.
Then powdered mustard, garlic powder, cayenne plus black or white pepper. I think that's usually it.
And I eat it with Tapatio. Tapatio is perfect for macaroni and cheese.
An old friend of mine used to make a remarkably good mac and cheese. All I remember about it is that he used equal parts cheddar and Velveeta, and baked it. I used to live on the stuff in the blue box, but since I started cooking for myself more seriously a couple years ago the idea of that stuff really turns me off. Can you guys go into a little more detail about what the "white sauce method" is? Did I miss or forget about an explanatory post somewhere else?
Hmmm, I thought we had had a mac 'n' cheese thread before, but it seems the several posts about it were embedded in another thread, starting here.
I'm not sure, but I was thinking the terms roux, white sauce and bechamel methods referred to making a goopy thick white sauce from butter, flour and milk, adding it to the cooked pasta and cheese and then baking it. That's how I make mac 'n' cheese. I keep it pretty boring, only mixing it up by having a variety of cheeses.
pasta:
cook per directions.
I use either bowties or noodles or those big diameter short tube kind (or large elbow macaroni, if I want to be traditional).
Cook enough to fill your baking dish 2/3 of the way.
white goopy sauce:
melt 1/4 cup butter in saucepan
add 1/4 cup flour, stirring constantly until well mixed and starting to cook
add 2 cups milk, slowly and stirring constantly
salt & pepper to taste (I like a lot of pepper in this)
bring close to boil and keep it there for 2 minutes,
remove from heat, let stand until it gets thick
assemble in baking dish (I use an 8x8 square low cake pan to maximize crusty top):
butter the dish
layer of noodles
layer of shredded cheese (yellow and white cheddar, jack, mozzarella, muenster for melty ones, also parmesan and romano for some stronger taste)
a couple of large spoonfuls of the goopy stuff
layer of noodles, then cheese again, then the remaining white sauce
then a nice dusting of cheddar to get all melted on top
Bake in 350degF oven for about 40 (or more) minutes until golden brown on top.
Years since I made it, but the way I used to do it was the eggs & evaporated milk method. Not baked, but browned the top under the grill. Breadcrumbs are good. A bit of wholegrain mustard for flavour. Never experimented with cheeses beyond bog-standard cheddar, sounds like a good idea though. The recipe dropped from my repertoire when I went vegan; I'm eating dairy again now, but tend to do so very sparingly, so I've never resurrected the dish.
Huh, pesci, I should give your method a whirl. I always melt the cheese directly into the goopy white sauce, instead of layering the sauce with the cheese.
I absolutely love macaronicheese though I tend to use use packet or microwave versions. Wonderful with some blue cheese grated and melted over the top!
2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni (7 ounces)
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground mustard
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 cups milk
2 cups shredded or cubed Cheddar cheese (8 ounces)
1. Heat oven to 350ºF.
2. Cook macaroni as directed on package.
3. While macaroni is cooking, melt butter in 3-quart saucepan over low heat. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Cook over medium low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is smooth and bubbly; remove from heat. Stir in milk. Heat to boiling, stirring constanly. Boil and stir 1 minute. Stir in cheese. Cook, stirring occasionally, until cheese is melted.
4. Drain macaroni. Gently stir macaroni into cheese sauce. Pour into ungreased 2-quart casserole. Bake uncovered 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbly.
This is a good mac and cheese recipe, the cheese when it's mixed with the flour heats up like a cheese sauce. I go by this recipe EXCLUDING the mustard and worcestechire sauce and top it with tomato slices for the last five minutes of baking time. It's yummy.
Michelle
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Huh, pesci, I should give your method a whirl. I always melt the cheese directly into the goopy white sauce, instead of layering the sauce with the cheese.
Maybe not! Looks like Mrs. Shelby has the same basic ingredients and mixes the cheese in there and tosses with the noodles before sticking in the baking dish. I think I'll try that next time I make it and see which I prefer.
There is a difference, I think. When I make mine, the different cheeses do stand out when you get a bit that wasn't totally mixed with the other stuff.
I was so inspired, I just made some this morning. I haven't dug into it yet, but it smells pretty yummy. I'd never tried blue cheese in mine, but based on those suggestions, I used a little hunk of some blue veiny stinky cheese in addition to mozarella, cheddar and shaved parmesan. I mixed the cheese into the white sauce and fully tossed the pasta, topped generously with grated mozarella, cheddar and parmesan before baking.
Oh hell yes. I'm hungry all over again. I usually use gorgonzola instead of blue cheese because I don't like the weird color tint that blue cheese gives to the white sauce.
I just done changed my mind about baked macaroni and cheese. That toasty golden crust just obliterated my usually crippling fear of squishy pasta.
You and your purty food!
If you seriously, SERIOUSLY undercook the pasta, it won't get crunchy. If it doesn't soften up enough during the baking process, you can tent it with foil and bake it for longer and nothing bad will happen.
pesci's macaroni and cheese looks like the avatar of all macaroni and cheese. I know what's for dinner at my house...
So after having beheld the wonder of pesci's magnificent macaroni and cheese, I decided I had to make some myself. I also decided that confronting one's fears is good, so I made the egg-and-evaporated-milk kind for the first time ever. Cook's Illustrated swears up and down that custard puts bechamel in the shade, and like I said I am not happy with my macaroni and cheese. So.
The principle is as follows: you mix 1 cup evaporated milk, 2 eggs, salt, pepper, mustard and a dash of Tabasco until all is combined. Then you cook the macaroni (I used farfalle, because that was what I had) until it is al dente, drain it and return it to the cooking pot. You then turn the heat on "low", melt a tablespoon of butter into the noodles, then, stirring frantically, you pour in the egg mixture and a whole fuckton of grated cheese. (The recipe called for 12 oz. I used one small package of sharp Cheddar and an ounce of Gorgonzola, just for kicks.) Stir, stir, stir. I imagine that if you got lazy with the stirring the eggs would scramble, but this is on the same principle as pasta carbonara and works the same way. The sauce will thicken up. If it looks too sticky you're supposed to add more evaporated milk -- and what else are you supposed to do with half a can of evaporated milk besides give it to the cats? They love it, but it is bad for them.
Anyway I did all this, and then I put the results in a baking dish, topped them with breadcrumbs that I'd sauteed in butter with a smashed garlic clove until they were brown and crunchy, and parked it under the broiler until the crumbs were annealed to the surface. This took about a millisecond. We ate this with broccoli.
The results, to my mind, were mixed. This method produces an extraordinarily suave, silky sauce. It's almost Velveeta-y, which is weird because I used regular ol' grainy Cheddar. So that was satisfying. It was also intensely cheesy-tasting, which made sense because I put the entire GDP of Wisconsin in there.
I realized, though, that it's the flavor of the bechamel that I associate with macaroni and cheese. This version was very good, but it didn't taste like macaroni and cheese to me. Cognitive dissonance abounded. But it was very fast and easy to do, and that texture was really f'n impressive.
I have a very, very nice white, creamy sauce recipe already.
But now I want to try something else. I think I will make pesci's recipe first, but this thread is quite old and I'm hoping some of the old folks might have new fantastic recipes and maybe some of the newer folks will have some tried and tested recipes we've never seen before.
I haven't made this or anything, but I'm contemplating making a mac and cheese with leeks, cheddar, parmesan, blue cheese and cream cheese. I have remnants of all of those and I'm pretty sure I can smoosh them all together in some way that ends up delicious.
Here's what I'm thinking I'll do: sautee the leeks in butter until they're soft, add some flour and whisk up a roux, add some milk and stir stir stir, add all the cheeses, maybe some Dijon mustard or grainy mustard, then when it's all melted, mix it up with some cooked penne, top it with herbed cracker crumbs and bake until bubbly and brown.
Macaroni and cheese
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