Macaroni and Cheese
Another classic recipe from Good Eats: The Early Years. Rumor has it that Thomas Jefferson's household were the inventors of macaroni and cheese, although this is debatable, he did serve macaroni and cheese at at least one state dinner. Jefferson tired to have the signature noodle made at his home but they did not live up to expectations so he ended up importing them from Italy along with multiple cheeses. The general population was introduced to this dish in 1937 when Kraft introduced their signature product. Due to its low cost it became a favourite for depression and World War II era cooks.
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| Slightly brunt macaroni |
Before reading up on this dish I had totally the wrong idea about what macaroni was. I had always thought macaroni refered to the shape of the pasta, but it really means the pasta was made with only semolina flour, from durham wheat, and water, no eggs. The shape of traditional noodles for mac and cheese are called elbow and there are hundreds of other shapes and sizes that fall under the title macaroni. While we are talking about ingredients I found a few interesting tidbits about cheddar cheese. Cheddar is a popular choice for macaroni (I'm still going to call the dish just macaroni even though we all now know that is a very ambiguous term) with its sharp flavour. Once a curds are created from cow's milk they are staked one on top of the other. The weight of all the cheese curd pushes the moisture out of the cheese giving cheddar its texture. This process is called "cheddaring," and is named for a village in the south of England where the cheese was first made. Without additives cheddar is a pale yellow colour not its signature orange. The addition of annatto seeds don't do much for flavour but give the cheese the colour we all know and love.
As for the actual execution it was going great up until the very end, the macaroni and cheese had been in the oven for the prescribed half and hour but the cheese on the top had not reached that glorious golden brown colour. I decided to crank up the broiler, I'm sure you can see where this is going, I got distracted... making a salad of all things. When I remembered it was too late, the top was already starting to smoke. The damage turned out to be not that bad, once the burned parts were mixed in with the rest they weren't that noticeable. Despite the burntness it was delicious! My pervious experience with homemade macaroni I found most of the sauces to be somewhat bland. This sauce certainly did not fall in that category, the addition of dry mustard and paprika really boosted the flavour! I would highly recommend this recipe.
Mac and Cheese Recipe
So what is a gratin? I asked myself the same question. It sounds pretty fancy but it is really a very simple technique that is common to many dishes. All a gratin is is some kind of toasted crust on the top of a casserole like dish. If the crust is made of bread crumbs (usually buttered), cheese or in this recipes case, Ritz crackers, they all fall under the gratin category. The macaroni from the last entry could also be classified as a gratin. So that's the meaning behind the fancy name but it doesn't really say much about the actual dish. Basically it was just a quiche, without a crust. Eggs, some cheese, mushrooms and the beet greens all baked in the oven, nothing to complicated. I will say that the beet greens, which were Swiss chard by the way, were not my favourite green. I would have much preferred spinach for this application. I think the Swiss chard was a little too earthy for my liking. I'm not really sure what "earthy" really means but they throw it around on the food network all the time. Does it mean that earthy foods taste like dirt? Not really sure but I think it fits with the Swiss chard's flavour (I'm not saying they taste like dirt though). Now that we are all throughly confused, try out this dish and see if you can describe Swiss chard's flavour better.
