So I'm making a homemade mac and cheese for Thanksgiving and I'm starting to peruse the internet for recipes. Since I love Veeky Forums anyway and enjoy lurking here, I thought I'd see what you guys thought.
Any favorite macaroni and cheese recipes? Favorite methods (baked/stovetop)? Do's and dont's?
Mac and cheese thread
Don'ts:
- Don't eat macaroni and cheese if you're older than 13.
>thinking all mac and cheese still comes in a cardboard box
>unironically posts on a cooking board
pleb get the fuck out
Equal parts butter and flower in a pot
Heat it up
Add milk and cheese to desired thickness and taste
Dump on top of cooked penne, dump breadcrumbs on top, bake at 400F for like 20 minutes or until the top is nice and crispy.
>flower
flour, fuck.
If you can get hold of some English mustard, add some to the mix but not a lot.
Here in Britain, macaroni cheese (or cauliflower cheese) often has a little English mustard added, not for a 'bite' but a small 'nip' ie. Flavour not heat.
By weight, not volume.
Roux is always by weight unless the fat is pre rendered in the pan, then add flour until it looks like wet sand
Make your roux, butter and flour till a light gold color in a sauce pan. Be careful to slowly add the flour and stir well for no lumps. Now your cheese selection. Add some cream or whole milk (I eyeball everything so don't ask for measurements too thin? Add flour too thick? More milk or cream) now cheese is most important part. I recommend using 3 types for tradition, luck, and complex flavors. Choose a hard and strong I.e. Real good real cheddar that's been aged and bandage wrapped a Parm from Parma etc. Now choose an aged sweeter cheese gruyere, old gouda, etc. Now add a creamier cheese for well creaminess, a mild washed rind like a taleggio might be real nice but a commodity triple cream would work too. Add some Italian seasoning or other preferred spices but you don't have to. I'm not telling you how to make pasta. Save the rinds from your hard cheese so you can grate out every last bit of cheese over the top before you reheat and voila your family will think you're a fucking chef or something.
This user knows what's good. If you have any breadcrumbs hanging around from making stuffing then break them up real small and sprinkle them on top with the cheese before reheating, it builds a really nice crust on top.
If you want to make a bit of a change from the norm, try frying off some chorizo and spinach in a pan and mixing it into the finished roux.
Only "plebs" or black people eat macaroni.
Thanks, user. Good on you to point out the part about weighing the flour and butter...you're weighing both the flour and the butter and not just the flour, right?
>flower
lol no worries, mate
English mustard
I'll take out a tiny bit of the final product, place in a separate bowl and try that. If it is fucking awesome then I'll go ahead and add it to the whole recipe and my family will have their first English mac and cheese. Thanks for the tip, user.
Bro!!! I might just experiment with your recipe tonight. I like the tips about the rinds. Never tried that before. I think I'm gonna make mac and cheese tonight following your recipe because there is still enough time to really get my recipe down!
Okay, buddy....hold on to that illusion of status if that's what does something for you. The rest of us, as already seen in this thread, are a bit more imaginative and less autistic than you.
>only plebs or black people eat shitty macaroni and cheese
>only autistic faggots never learn how to make god-tier mac and cheese that the plebs and black people could never imagine
FTFY. Now fuck off.
Chef John at foodwishes.com has good technique videos, and the Alton Brown recipe from Good Eats is also fabulous.
Ignore this faggot Properly made mac & cheese is godly. You have to use good quality cheese. Your choice, I use sharp cheddar and Gruyère, sometimes Gouda, but you must grate the block yourself, no bagged crap with the cellulose, it doesn't melt right. Always use a real Parmesan, and top with crunchy buttered panko.
Summary: butter and flour roux, make a bechamel sauce with cold whole milk. Flavor it up a bit with dry mustard, salt, pepper, grated shallots if you wish. Once that's simmered until thickened, slowly stir in the grated cheeses off heat. Use good cheese, its the primary flavor of this dish! Your elbow macaroni should be boiled al dente in well salted water, I like the bigger elbows with the ridges over the small elbows. Mix your pasta with the cheese sauce, it should be loose and creamy, not too thick or else it will be dry-ish after baking. Pour into baking casserole, glass or ceramic, top with more cheese and buttered panko, and bake until bubbly and crispy/browned on top.
It's Thanksgiving so do a whole pound of pasta and double up the recipe. You can put two dishes side by side in the oven, its amazing leftover too.
Use good ingredients and careful technique, and its going to be amazing.
>Any favorite macaroni and cheese recipes? Favorite methods (baked/stovetop)? Do's and dont's?
Well, stovetop is always the horrible 2nd best option. The only convenience to it is having your oven free for other dishes.
What I do is always bake it in a pyrex or ceramic dish, lightly buttered. I always use ridged noodles for clinging sauce, and prefer Barilla Cellentani (ridged spirals), pipette, or their more curled elbows. Boil them in salted water til a true al dente, drain. While boiling the noodles, do your roux (and 1/2 finely chopped onion optionally) and use a mixture of cream and whole milk, and add in 50% of your shredded cheeses to make a mornay. Place noodles back in boiling pot, fold in sauce, and then fold in 50% more cheese and pour into your baking dish. Make homemade breadcrumbs (coarse) in processor. Good thick layer on top, dot with butter and a bunch more cheese. Cover loosely with foil. Park in fridge (can make ahead!), or bake immediately with foil on 30 minutes, and uncovered for another 15 minutes until browned as desired.
I use a 1.5lb of cheese per pound of pasta which will fill a 2qt baking dish. I like 2/3rds very sharp cheddar as well as 1/3rd something more melty, like gouda or colby. Parm goes into my topping too. If you want to go crazy strings of cheese with each bite, dice the cheese you fold in.
Mmm I've done the chorizo trick too. I swiped it from a chef friend of mine.Thanks op. Remember don't go cheap on the cheese I know it's like 20$/lb but you don't need a lot. Three 5-6 $ hunks should do the trick. And really the rest of your ingredient's are so cheap and so bland you want to spend the $ here.
I've also added beer but I didn't like it as much. The ppl i made it for liked it a lot tho
I've also used some of a neutral hot sauce in the cheese sauce, typically franks. Gives it some richer color and has a nice kick to it. Probably a similar result to the English mustard.
I can tell you're a female or a really feminine butt pirate. Anyway about the mac and cheese, women can't cook,you can only bake cakes so do that.
>blocks
Good cheese comes in wheels or loaves blocks are commodity trash and shouldn't be allowed to carry the same names as the varieties they attempt to immitate
Yeah, but the trick is not to over do it . . . .you just need enough to know it is there, rather than burning your tongue and reaching for a glass of cold milk.
I make mine this way but my cheese sauce always gets grainy, am I adding too much cheese or is cheddar not the best for the sauce? I remove my bechemel from the heat before adding the cheese so heat isn't the problem, wut do?
There is no reason to remove it from the heat, and if your sauce cools down too quickly, the cheese won't melt. Also, don't use pre-grated cheese.
THAT MAC LOOKS DELICIOUS
replacing some of the butter with bacon grease gives the whole thing a nice flavor (assuming you have grease from decent bacon)
Don't overdo it because bacon grease is not a 1:1 substitute for butter and if you use too much you'll end up with the dish having a heavy greasy mouthfeel.
>grainy
Whenever that's happened to me its either the cheese not melting all the way into the sauce, or not enough milk so there's still some clumpy flour granuals floating around
Shut up
The roux isn't cooked to completion in which case it's the flour. But it's also possible that the sauce is too hot when you add the cheese, even if you turn the heat off first you will be surprised by how easily it starts to precipitate or whatever.
Go shove a block up your ass faggot. Muh sargento
SHUT UP
U mad no one like ur sargento?
STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT
NRRRRRR
Make sure you cum in it
People always forget the nutmeg in the béchamel. It works with the cream and sweeter cheese flavors, just like the mustard works with the sharp cheeses.
Do you work for sargento?
Good tip.
> Alton Brown
> need $3000 worth of special equipment to make mac and cheese
just go to epicurious.com and search for Mac and cheese. Check out the highest rated recipes that have a large number of reviews. You will find a winner for sure.
I would stay away from some sites like allrecipes, which every recipe seems to start with "add a can of campbells cream of mushrom soup". (there are some good recipes on that site, just a lot of bad/low quality ones too)
Chicken stock base, splash of white wine. Corn flour to thicken. Three cheese combo of your choosing. Dash of Mustard. Pour on pasta and bake. These other assholes are addicted to flour.
That sounds kind of silly considering it's a giant casserole of wheat flour noodles.
...
Grainy might mean you overcooked the cheese.
You NEVER boil cheese. That's when it separates and you get greasy, grainy shit.
You melt the cheese, you dont cook it. Trust me when I say add the cheese OFF the heat. There is plenty of heat in the hot bechamel sauce to melt the cheese. NEVER boil your goddamn cheese, this ruins it!
Kek