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Tillamook Cheddar Mac and Cheese
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle.
Ingredients
- 500g elbow macaroni
- 85g butter
- 70g flour
- 1L whole milk, warmed
- 450g sharp Tillamook cheddar, grated
- 1 tsp dry mustard
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- Dash of hot sauce
- For the top: 100g breadcrumbs, 3 tbsp melted butter, 50g cheddar
- Salt and white pepper
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cook the macaroni two minutes shy of al dente and drain.
- Melt the butter, whisk in the flour, and cook 2 min. Add the warm milk gradually, whisking, and simmer to a smooth sauce. 2 min
- Off the heat, add the cheddar in handfuls, stirring until each melts before the next. Season with mustard, nutmeg, hot sauce, salt, and pepper.
- Fold the pasta through the sauce and turn into a buttered dish.
- Toss the breadcrumbs with melted butter and cheese, scatter over, and bake at 190C for 25 min until bubbling and gold. 25 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Alpine white (dry Riesling, Grüner)
- Also Right
- Champagne: bubbles scrub richness
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling apple
Melted cheese coats; acid and carbonation scrub: high-cut whites and Champagne keep the fondue from winning.
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