“A great Mac and Cheese comes down to personal taste. I like mine extra saucy, creamy and cheesy. And it just so happens that it’s made one pot – WITHOUT cream!” There are so many Mac and Cheese recipes “out there” that it’s mind boggling. I have made it various ways. I particularly like to try “chef” versions. When I came to choose one that I wanted to share with you, I didn’t know which to go with. I don’t think there is such thing as the “perfect” or “best” Mac and Cheese. Restaurants around the world have put their own spin on it, with everything from making it with truffles, six types of cheese and goats milk, to name a few. A great Mac and Cheese comes down to personal taste. For me, extra saucy and creamy is what does it for me. Cheesy goes without saying. 🙂 Don’t you just want to do a face plant in this? Look how creamy and sauce it looks!
To make a Mac and Cheese as saucy as this with cream would require several cartons of cream. My arteries clog up just at the thought. 🙂 Happy thoughts, but realistically, it would be so insanely rich that you wouldn’t be able to eat very much of it! So instead, I make my creamy sauce using a simple roux of butter and flour. Don’t let that fancy word “roux” deter you, it is really simple and takes minutes to make. The trick to making this in one pot is making the cooking liquid thin enough for the pasta to absorb and rehydrate WITHOUT going mushy but reduces down enough in the time it takes for the pasta to cook so you end up with the perfect amount of rich, creamy sauce. And that sauce needs to have the right seasoning and flavour which is always tricky when making sauces that reduce alot as it is hard to guess how intense the flavour will be once reduced.
One thing about any creamy pastas is that you really need to eat it straight away. Even after 30 minutes, the sauce continues to get absorbed into the pasta and thickens quite a bit so you lose the sauciness. Plus the pasta gets soft. So when it’s ready, holler for your family to get to the dinner table so they can have their grub while it’s fresh out of the oven when it’s at its absolute peak. 🙂 Anyway, I’d be disappointed if you have any leftover. Whether you’re making this for 2 or 6! – Nagi Notes for Food Nerds (like myself!) – Why this recipe works without ending up with mushy pasta and curdled sauce:
- Pasta takes a LONG time to cook in a thick sauce and turns very mushy. Thinning the sauce alot at the beginning allows the pasta to cook in almost the same time as it would in boiling water. * The key to this recipe is getting the amount of liquid right so that the sauce is initially thin enough for the pasta to cook but then by the end of the cooking time for the pasta, the sauce reduces down to be a thick, creamy sauce. That’s why you can’t simply sub the macaroni with any other pasta you want without adjusting the quantity of liquid required – because different pastas cook in different times. * The cheese is stirred through at the end because if it is added before the pasta it cooked, it thickens the sauce and it takes much longer for the pasta to cook. Plus the sauce has a tendency to curdle so you need to stir it a few times. * When you stir the cheese through at the end, the residual heat melts it very quickly. Also, as you stir it, the sauce thickens even more. * The panko topping is added at the very end because otherwise it will sink in the liquid.
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