Mac and Cheese

I’m sure almost all of you would agree with me that, as far as traditional American comfort foods go, mac and cheese has to be one of the most iconic, and one of the favorites, especially among the youngsters. As good as it is when you’re at a casual summer barbeque with friends, celebrating Thanksgiving with your family, or just craving some comfort food, there are a few adaptations we can make to the traditional ways of making this dish to make it even better.

There are three key components to this dish that’ll make it or break it. First, sufficiently undercooking the pasta. Second, building a mornay that doesn’t split. Third, creating a topping and baking the dish to completion. Mastering each of these tasks individually is crucial to mastering the perfect mac and cheese. But don’t be too afraid—these tasks may look difficult, but they really aren’t.
Elbow macaroni is the traditional shape associated with this dish. And as good and nostalgic as mac and cheese with this shape is, there are a few shapes that actually hold up better to the sauce and the baking process. Instead of the traditional elbow shape, I suggest gemelli or cavatappi, in that order of preference.

Regardless of its final use, I like to cook each pound of pasta in a gallon of water. But unlike a lot of my other pasta dishes, pasta to be used in mac and cheese should never be cooked in water to al dente. This is a common mistake people make with this dish: cooking the pasta to al dente in the water overcooks it in the oven, and the texture is nowhere near as good as it would be if the proper procedure had been followed. Luckily, pasta boxes or bags give the time required to reach al dente. We can use that information as a baseline, and, in this case, subtract 3-4 minutes from that time, and drain the pasta after that much time.

Bringing a gallon of water to a rolling boil and then parcooking pasta can be quite a slow process, but we can use this time to our advantage. Preheat your oven to 400 Fahrenheit. We need to build a béchamel to eventually turn into a mornay, so this is the best time to do that. By doing things in parallel, the pasta doesn’t get soggy as it waits for the sauce, and the sauce doesn’t develop a skin or thicken too much as it cools. (Sauces thickened by a roux, a mixture of flour and butter, like most of the French Mother Sauces, thicken faster and faster as they get progressively cooler.) We need a mornay sauce eventually, but a good mornay starts with a Béchamel base. Béchamel is one of the five classic Mother Sauces of the French cuisine, so I’ve already covered how to prepare it in a series I did back in October. Since I’ve already covered béchamel, I’ll just create a link to that recipe which you can access by clicking here. 

Once you’ve finished the béchamel as described by that recipe, come back here to learn how to turn the béchamel into a mornay and finish the dish. I will give one tip about the béchamel before moving on: for each pound of pasta, make the roux according to the instructions in the other recipe with 3 tablespoons each of all-purpose flour and unsalted butter.

Once you are satisfied with the taste of your Béchamel, check its texture. A proper béchamel should reach nappe. That is, it should look like a tiny Red Sea if you coat a metal spoon with it and drag your finger across the back of the spoon: there should be two distinct sides of the spoon covered in sauce, a trail in the center where your finger was, and the sauce on either side should not flow back to the center to cover the trail you left. It takes time, but with enough practice, you’ll be able to bring any sauce to nappe. A mornay is a béchamel to which cheese has been added. Cheddar is, of course, the classic cheese for maximum nostalgia in this dish. I already recommended something other than the classic way by suggesting a different shape of pasta, but I’m not going to do that here regarding the cheese. 

Cheddar is a great cheese on its own, and it works really well in mornay sauces, but I do have one recommendation. Just make sure that if you use cheddar, you get a high-quality mild cheddar. Cheaper cheeses (particularly cheddar) usually have extra emulsifiers. These compounds are harmless, and you don’t notice them when you eat the cheese cold or at room temperature, but their presence can slightly change the texture of the cheese when it melts, as it will in this application. Higher quality cheeses lack these additives, so we need to be more careful not to break the emulsion of the sauce, but by using better cheeses, the results will be superior. Milder cheeses, for reasons I don’t quite know how to explain, split less often than sharper cheeses.

I recommend adding a little bit of mustard to a mornay sauce for two reasons. The tang of the mustard cuts through the richness of the cheese quite nicely, and the chemistry of the mustard works in our favor by helping to naturally keep the mornay stable even after the cheese is incorporated and the sauce is heated substantially in a hot oven.

Ideally, it is best to hand-grate a high-quality cheese into a mornay sauce. In any case, however you add your cheese (shredded or grated by the store or processing plant, or grated yourself), do so with the pan containing the sauce off the heat. If direct heat is applied to the sauce before the cheese is combined, the sauce will split. Feel free to adjust the consistency of the sauce with extra milk if it becomes too thick.

Add ¼ cup of olive oil to a skillet, and once the oil is hot, add 1 cup of panko breadcrumbs. Keep the pan and its contents moving constantly and fry the breadcrumbs until they’re golden brown. Remove them from the oil and place them on a paper towel to drain. This should be completed in time with finishing the mornay and the pasta being ready (several minutes shy of al dente). Once all these components are ready, combine the pasta with the mornay sauce, and then transfer the sauced pasta to an oven-safe dish. Top with the breadcrumbs. Cook until golden brown and bubbly. Serve.

(Credit to Fine Cooking)