Making REAL Mac and Cheese

It's tempting, when beginning a piece about mac and cheese, to go on a long-winded rant about all those nasty powder-cheese concoctions that line the shelves, trying to lure you with their supposed ease of preparation, their overly salty cheesiness, and strangely skinny noodles.

I'll go ahead and resist that particular temptation, as I'm sure it's been done to death. As a transition, though, I will share a funny anecdote--the story of what happened the first time I ever tried to make Kraft Mac and Cheese. I was probably a sophomore in high school, and wasn't much of a cook at the time. My range was limited to after-school microwaving and toaster-ovening and sporadic Sunday-morning pancake-flipping.

But, I was hungry after school and the usual stuff wasn't going to cut it this day, so I decided to make myself a batch of the ol' blue box. I was no cook, but I could follow instructions, I figured. So I did exactly what the box said; I cooked the pasta in boiling water, then added the contents of the packet, plus a little milk and butter. I stirred and stirred, but I was mystified about why it never thickened up. It was like soup.

What the heck did I do wrong? I called a friend and asked her and we went through it step by step. "Ok, so then you drained the pasta, and added the cheese powder, right?" she said.

"Uh...drained the pasta?"

Whoops. I guess that's where it went bad.

Seriously, though, this tells you about my level of cooking ability at the time. I didn't know to drain the pasta, and the instructions didn't even mention this crucial step! I blame Kraft's recipe writers. C'mon, people! Lowest common denominator! Plastic garbage bags have messages telling me not to wear them over my face, and my wife's hairdryer has a tag on the cord with a message that reads "DO NOT USE WHILE SLEEPING", but you can't tell me to drain the frickin' pasta?!

(As an aside, the cheese powder packet that comes with the Kraft Mac and Cheese is really good sprinkled over hot popcorn. For a real dorm-room classic, combine the cheese packet from Kraft dinner with the foil seasoning packet that comes with ramen noodles, sprinkle over popcorn. Consume while drinking cheap beer. Enjoy.)

Anyway, I've come a long way since those days and now I make what I (and my family) believe is the very best macaroni and cheese......ever! This is the very same recipe I used in my triumphant appearance at the first annual sMACkdown, at which I tied Stephanie (Top Chef) Izard.

What follows is a step-by-step guide to making my mac and cheese. Included in this presentation is a bonus step-by-step to making Bechamel sauce; one of the classic French "mother sauces" and, as such, a wonderful leaping-off point for literally hundreds of different sauces. Seriously, Google it. Stuff like knowing how to make Bechamel with your eyes closed is why chefs don't need to use recipes.

First, get a pot of water going for the pasta, and start making the Bechamel. I don't need to tell you to salt the pasta water, do I? It should taste like ocean water.

Bechamel sauce is simply milk thickened with a roux. A roux is simply butter (or oil) and flour cooked together in equal parts to make a paste. Put the butter in a saucepan over low, add the flour and let it melt. Whisk the flour and butter together as it melts. You want to let the roux cook a bit just to cook out the raw flour flavor, but for mac and cheese, we're using a light-colored, or "blonde" roux, so you shouldn't let it take on any color.

Once the roux is dry and kind of crumbly, and it's cooked for a few minutes, remove about half of it, so as to be better able to control how thick your sauce gets. You may end up using all of it, but it's better to be able to add it little by little than to have to keep adding more liquid to thin down your sauce.




Next, add the milk. Just a little at first. The roux begins thickening when it's boiled, so adding just a little milk will allow the mixture to boil almost immediately. It will quickly thicken up to the consistency of mashed potatoes (or wallpaper paste), which allows you to whisk out any lumps before adding the rest of the milk. Once it thickens up like you see in the pic to the left, go ahead and add the rest of the milk.







In the meantime, grate your cheese. I use cheddar (for flavor and color) and another cheese with better melting characteristics like Monterey Jack, fontina, or Swiss. My go-to is Gruyere, and then I add some Parmano cheese to bring up the sharpness.






Also in the meantime (the milk takes a while to come up to a boil), make the breadcrumb topping. I use panko, salt and pepper, more Parmano cheese, chopped parsley, and melted butter. Just melt the butter in the microwave, combine everything else in a bowl, and then pour in the butter and stir it all around with a fork so the melted butter coats everything else.

By now the Bechamel will be more or less ready. You want it pretty loose, since adding all the cheese will thicken it up. It should have started to thicken, and come to a gentle boil. Let it boil for a couple minutes to allow the roux to thicken it, and add more roux as necessary to adjust the consistency. It's better to over-thicken it, since you can always thin it out with a bit more milk. But once you add the cheese, you can't add more roux, since bringing it to a boil would cause the cheese to separate.

Once your Bechamel has thickened and you've allowed it to boil for a few minutes, remove it from the heat, let it cool a bit, and then add all the grated cheese to it, whisking to melt and incorporate the cheese. You'll also want to season it here. I use salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce--not for the heat, but for the acidity it adds. Make sure you taste and re-season enough times so that you get that kind of pinch in the back of your cheek that the sharpness of the cheddar provides.

The sauce should be creamy and you should see some stringy-ness from all the melting cheese when you pull your whisk out. If it's too thick, add some milk to thin it down. You want it kind of thin, since adding the pasta, allowing it to cool, and baking it will all thicken it.

When the pasta's cooked, drain it well, add the sauce to the large pasta-cooking pot, and then combine the pasta and sauce, tossing it well to coat it in the sauce.

CRUCIAL TIP: Try to make sure your pasta is hot when you toss it with the cheese sauce, since it'll absorb the sauce much better than it will if you let it cool down first. Also, once the pasta and the sauce are combined, let the mixture sit in the pot for a while before putting it in your baking dish. This lets the sauce thicken up and soak into the pasta, preventing the sauce from pooling up in the bottom of the baking dish.

At this point, taste it and adjust your seasonings again. Even if your sauce was perfectly seasoned, you may need to add more salt, pepper, or Tabasco to compensate for the addition of the bland pasta. You can also add more milk at this point if the mixture is too thick.

If you're adding stuff like peas, bacon, or ham, this is the point at which to do it.





Turn the whole mess out into a baking dish, top it with your crumb topping, and put it into a 350° oven, and bake it until you can see the cheese sauce bubbling up. Then crank up your oven's broiler and get the topping nice and brown.



That's it. The top should be all toasty, buttery, and burnt-cheese tasting from the grated cheese in the topping, the mac and cheese will be super-creamy and rich-tasting, and you'll get that great contrast of the creamy interior with the crunchy browned topping. It's awesome stuff.

Plus, once you've got the roux and Bechamel technique down, you can use it to make tons of other sauces. Country gravy and biscuits, chicken fried steak with sage cream gravy, and sauce Nantua (a cream-based Bechamel flavored with crawfish and other shellfish) are all examples of fairly well-known Bechamel-based sauces.

So that's it. My (nearly) award-winning mac and cheese recipe, complete with step-by-step photos and commentary. You now officially have no excuse for ever again buying any blue box, lecithin-laden, Velveeta Whiz-based product.

Cheap Stuff that Works Vol.2--Benriner Japanese Mandoline

Stuff that works is good. Stuff that lasts a long time and works is really good. Stuff that works, lasts a long time, and costs less than twenty bucks is worth blogging about. (Although some people seem to think their bellybutton lint is worth blogging about).

At any rate, I will now sing the praises of the Benriner Japanese Mandoline Slicer (pictured above). This little gem does everything the big, expensive, stainless steel mandolines do, for a fraction of the price. Plus, it's easier to clean, easier to change/replace the julienne teeth on, and....did I mention how friggin' cheap it is?

Ok, some background; basically, a mandoline is a device that houses a very sharp blade in a body that allows the user to slide a piece of food (like, say, a potato) across it, yielding a very thin, even slice (like, say, for a potato chip). Most have additional attachments that add teeth to the blade so that the thin slice can also be cut cross-wise at the same time it's sliced, producing uniform julienne strips. They're widely used in restaurant kitchens because they allow cooks to do things more consistently and faster than they could do with their knives.

Most restaurant kitchens use this mandoline. It's French, made by a company called Bron, and costs about $200. It works well, although it's kind of tricky to configure--you have to flip the base/support thingy around a few different ways to get it to stand the way you want--and also, the teeth tend to get bent after a while. But it's a good product. It works.

I will now digress with a story; when I was in culinary school, I landed my first real restaurant job. I was making $6.50 an hour at a now-defunct place called Spruce here in Chicago. I had never worked in a restaurant before and had been in culinary school for about 9 months. This was where I first encountered a mandoline. Of course, the moment I first encountered this device, we were deep in the shit, way behind, and the fire-breathing Napolean running the show was screaming for something--I can't quite remember what--but I do know that it involved cutting some sort of root vegetable razor-thin on a mandoline.

So I ran to the cooler, plunged my hands into buckets filled with ice cold water and the root vegetable in question, neatly peeled in quantity ahead of time, ran back to my station near the fryolator, and set up the mandoline as quickly as I could, after which, I began slicing, frantically, the desperately-needed root vegetable (I think it was taro...or maybe yucca) so that chips could be made. Chips on which, I was led to believe, the entire success of the restaurant depended.

Victory! As my hand worked the root vegetable across the blade of the mandoline in a blur, a pile of paper-thin slices began to accumulate beneath the device. Another cook swept them into the fryer as fast as I could slice them and the highly in-demand chips were produced. Crisis of the moment averted. The fate of the restaurant was secure! "Don't forget to season them, you stupid piece of shit!", the little genius chef barked as his beady little eyes spotted them emerging from the fryer. "Yes, chef!", I replied, pleasantly surprised by his acknowledgment of my hard work. He was clearly impressed by my speed and prowess.

But as the emergent situation resolved itself and the yucca (or taro) chips were placed perilously atop the dish for which they would serve as the essential garnish, I noticed something strange. Why was my cutting board all red? What's all this mess under my mandoline.....? Wait....is that....?

Yep. Blood. My blood. A lot of it.

These mandolines are sharp. Sickeningly, frighteningly sharp. So sharp was the blade of this brand-new mandoline, that I had run my four fingertips, along with the side of my thumb, across the blade multiple times without even feeling it. Of course, once the heat of the moment passed and I saw the blood, my brain stem finally re-connected with the nerves in my fingers and the pain hit me all at once, blindingly.

Suffice to say that I worked the rest of the shift with two rubber gloves on my hand and my fingers looked like wooden matchsticks because the tips kept bleeding and the blood built up in the fingertips, reservoir-tip style, and balooned up. Cuts inflicted by really sharp blades take forever to stop bleeding.

That little story is intended to serve as the disclaimer for this piece of equipment. Warning--blades are sharp. It's written on the box too, but I think my anecdote makes a stronger impression.

Getting back to the subject at hand, the Benriner's blade is equally sharp. Did I mention it's twenty bucks? Less, even. I saw one at H-Mart the other day for like fifteen.

So what's the difference between the cheapie and other mandolines like the $400 Shun model, the above-mentioned Bron, or the as-seen-on-tv V-slicer?

Not much. The Benriner can't do gaufrettes (aka "waffle-cut"). So, if that's a deal-breaker, you can shell out the extra $180. That'll buy you a lot of trips to Arby's. Or, you could just buy yourself an old fashioned krinkle cutter for five bucks and use the $175 you have left to buy like 700 pounds of potatoes. Is anyone really making waffle-cut fries at home anyway?

Other than that, the wonder-cheapie does everything the big, heavy, shiny mandolines can do. Seriously. The expensive ones almost certainly have better blades that will last longer, but you can buy ten Benriners for the same price as one Bron, and I guarantee that the Bron's blade won't last ten times as long. I've had the same Benriner for about four years now and it's fine.

What else? Well, the plastic on the lil' cheapster gets stained. Mine's kind of an ugly red/orange color from doing carrots and beets on it, and it won't wash off. The color is somehow kind of impregnated into the plastic. What. Ever. Again, if this bugs you, toss it and buy another. They're twenty bucks. But it doesn't bug me. I don't need my kitchen tools to be shiny. Or even clean.

What else can I tell you? You'll lose some of the teeth, but you can buy replacements for about five bucks. DO NOT lose the screw that adjusts the slice thickness. I worked with a guy once who always lost the most important little element of any machine and he always tried to jimmy it up with wooden skewers. I spent way too much of my life adjusting the broken bits of skewer that he'd jammed into the lid of the robot coupe, the screw adjustment on the mandoline, and the ice cream spinner. Just don't unscrew it all the way.

Common sense. Such is life. Why spend $200 when you can get almost the same thing for $20? You'd be surprised how many people would when the $200 version is shiny, French, and the only one they sell at Macy's, Williams-Sonoma, or wherever. Don't do it. Buy the cheap little Benriner and use the money you save to buy more root vegetables.