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.

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