Macaroni & Cheese

Mac and cheese is the ultimate comfort food. Today I'm making a classic macaroni and cheese completely from scratch. There are no boxes, no shortcuts, no Velveeta cheese. My mac and cheese starts off with a blend of five different cheeses that all work together in harmony to give you that perfect balance of creaminess and sharpness. Right away, I'm already breaking the basic rules of mac and cheese by using cavatappi instead of elbow macaroni, and I'll tell you why. This little piece of pasta right here is basically just a longer version of your typical elbow macaroni. Most important is that it also has these nice little ridges and what that does is allows all that nice mac and cheesy goodness to stick to it once you've made that sauce. As a first step, I'm gonna boil a big pot of water. When making a mac and cheese, it's good to use a nice heavy-bottomed pot like this one because we'll be building our full mac and cheese in here before we eventually pour it off into the final dish that we'll be broiling it in. You know what they say, a watch pot never boils. Oh, there it is. They were wrong. A very important step anytime you're cooking pasta is to make sure you salt it, and typically I say salt it even a little more than you think you need. The basic rule of thumb is to salt it until it tastes like the ocean, and the reason for that is that as it cooks, that salt is gonna go into the pasta and you'll end up with a much more flavorful mac and cheese. Because our pasta will continue cooking throughout some of the other stages of the mac and cheese process, take a look at the package instructions for whatever pasta you're using and cook just a few minutes under that. So mine here says to cook for six minutes. I'm just gonna cook for about four. Every time I cook pasta, I always give it a nice little quick stir just to loosen everything up in the pot so nothing sticks together, and then we'll let this cook until it's super al dente. If your pot ever starts to boil over when you're making pasta or anything, you can always try the old wooden spoon trick, which supposedly stops it from going. I guess we'll have to see, because I feel like it works sometimes and other times it just doesn't work. And while this is going, we'll grab the rest of the things we need to prep the mac and cheese. So I need a grater, I need my strainer. It's not boiling over, so that's good. You should never blindly trust the cook time instructions for anything. Make sure you taste it yourself. Everybody's oven is different, everybody's burners are different. I would say about another 60 seconds and we're good. What we're basically looking for here is a bit chewier than al dente. Since we're cooking this pasta a little bit more throughout the process, it'll eventually come to that perfect doneness level. One more taste. It's done. That happened super fast. Now, work quickly, because once your pasta is done, it's gonna keep cooking every second that you wait. Same pot, bring it back. We're not saving the pasta water this time, and that's on purpose. Put this over a bowl, bring it back. We'll hit this with a nice quick drizzle of olive oil, just so the pasta doesn't stick together. Remember, you don't wanna put too much olive oil, just enough to make sure it doesn't stick. And then I'll give it a nice gentle mix just to make sure everything is evenly coated. Done. Move this off to the side. Now, before the cheese, time to build the sauce. First, we're gonna go in with some heavy cream. Beautiful. Then, some whole milk. With our milk and cream, we'll wanna add in tons of flavor, and to do that, we'll use some garlic and a little bit of thyme. So first, the garlic. I actually have a nice little trick to peeling all those cloves. I just put them in a bowl, and then I just shake. See if it worked. There's one, peeled. There's another, peeled. There's another peeled. And once we've got a few cloves peeled, I'll go ahead once more and smash just to open them up a little bit, get out a little bit more of that flavor. And in they go. And then, a lot of thyme, which again, will give off some of the flavor into the fat that's inside all this milk and cream. And finally, a nice sprinkle of dry mustard, just enough to get that flavor. Then, a bit of smoked paprika, one of my favorite ingredients to put in a mac and cheese. And finally, fresh cracked black pepper. We'll put this over super low heat. You really never want milk or cream to boil. Basically, that heat is just gonna help pull out some of the flavor from those different aromatics. So we did the mac, and now we're gonna move on to the cheese. For each of the five cheeses in this mac and cheese, I have a reason for why I picked them. First is cheddar. I always use cheddar because it's gonna give you that sharpness that you need, and also that classic mac and cheese flavor. And also because cheddar just happens to be my favorite cheese. Depending on how aged the cheddar you choose is, it'll also have different levels of sharpness. So if you like a sharper, more bitter mac and cheese, then choose an older cheddar. Ooh, now that we have our mountain of cheddar, we can move on to our gouda. I'll just need to trim off the edges of that red cheese casing. And what the gouda's gonna do is give us a nice, mild, nutty creaminess, while also giving us all that melty goodness that we want in our mac and cheese. You need to make sure that you use some cheeses that are gonna give you that stringiness if you wanna get that nice, gooey cheese pull at the end. All right, let's look at our gouda mountain. Mountain gouda, just a whole lot of cheese. And the very last cheese we'll grate is this mozzarella, which will give us stretchiness and a very nice, gooey mac and cheese texture. This one can be a little harder to grate. So if you leave it in the fridge or even toss it in the freezer for a few minutes before you grate it, it can help a lot. As you can tell, I forgot to do that. And there is our mozzarella. Sometimes when I'm making mac and cheese, I do step back and look at how much cheese there really is. And this isn't even all our cheese. There's still two more. I just need a bowl. And into that bowl, I'll add my mozzarella, then my gouda, and finally, my cheddar. And once it's all in there, I'll give it a nice mix to make sure everything is evenly combined. This is the time to just really get in there with your hands, but be gentle. You do wanna keep the cheese intact as much as possible. That'll help you get that nice stringiness at the end. And now that this is fully mixed, I'll move it off to the side, and it's time to come back over to this cream. First, quick taste. Remember, this is not gonna be salty yet. You're not looking for salt. We're just looking to make sure that the thyme and the garlic actually infused. At this point in the process, use your best judgment on how much of that flavor that you want. I'm happy with where it is now, so I'll use a slotted spoon to carefully take out all those extra bits that we don't want in our final mac and cheese. If it's easier, you can also strain it, but this is a slightly faster way of doing this part. I'm also okay with a few extra bits of the actual thyme leaves being left in there, but nobody wants to chomp down on a whole clove of garlic in a mac and cheese. Now, it's time for the fun part, putting half of our cheese into that really well-seasoned creamy milk mixture here to let it all melt down. The rest of this cheese will be set off to the side, and we can use that to layer our mac and cheese when we build it later. You can see that at a really nice, low temperature, that cheese should start melting right away, and we're already gonna get some of that nice stringiness from the cheese, which is a really good sign here. Also, don't forget your goat cheese at this stage in the process. I'm just gonna crumble all of that up into here, and that goat cheese will melt quickly and easily. And remember, if you want different types of cheese, you should use different types of cheese, some Gruyere, some Monterey Jack, some Havarti, really whatever you want, but I would urge you to think about the reason for using each one. Make sure all that cheese works together, and make sure it's all balanced. Once we've given it a nice stir, and we can start to see some of that stringy cheesiness falling down from our spoon, we are ready to add in all of our pasta. And now, I think this is my favorite part, just the mixing process here, layering that cheese, that gooeyness, through all of that mac and cheese, and just listening to all the sounds. Oh, my arm's tired. I think I could probably stir this for 15, maybe 20 minutes without getting bored, because it's that perfect mixture of smell, of sound, and you just know when you're looking at it that it's gonna be good. Now, for the layering process, I don't wanna tell you how to do it, because you should really do it however you want, but the way I like to do it is to take about half the pasta and just cover the bottom of your dish. Oh, my God, it's just shimmering in the light. It's so silky. And once you feel like you've gotten nice coverage of that bottom first layer, make sure you gently pat it down, just to make sure you're giving equal love to every little corner here. And this right here is why we save all that cheese. We'll go ahead with a nice, big layer of cheese all across the center of our whole dish, making sure you spread it out nice and even. And one last little tip while I'm layering is that if you can grate your cheese the longer way like this, this will help to give you those longer, stringier cheese pulls when you go to eventually serve your mac and cheese. It's not gonna change the flavor, but it might make you and your guests a little bit more excited. And then go on with that second layer of macaroni. I like to pick a serving dish that'll be the proper size to really get filled out with your mac and cheese. I think it's nice to have it almost bubbling over the top. In a way, it almost sort of looks more inviting. Oh man, this looks so good. I wanna eat a piece right now so bad, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna wait. So, some of you might be watching right now and saying, wait a second, you're not really quite filling the top of it. That's because we're not done yet. Parmesan cheese. This beautiful little pyramid of cheese is how we finish off our mac and cheese, and that's because it's nice and salty, so it gives that nice kick right off the top, but also, it's gonna brown as we broil it and give us this really, really nice, crispy, delicious, golden topping. I'm getting it all over the cutting board. I don't even care. I just want more and more and more Parmesan cheese. It's snowing Parmesan cheese. You are ready to go into the oven. We're gonna put this at a nice, medium-high broil. What that's gonna do is kind of melt that cheese through the center of our macaroni and also give us a nice, golden brown top. One other thing that's nice to do here is to make sure that you put something under the mac and cheese so that if it spills over or bubbles over at all, you're not gonna ruin your oven. When your oven is preheated to a nice, high broil, you can go ahead and toss it in. Watch it carefully. You don't wanna mess this up. It's a lot of cheese to burn. Visually, what I love here is that on the tops of some of the bits of pasta that are peeking out from all the cheese, they've gotten really nice and golden and crispy, and that's gonna give a nice little crunch for some of those bites, which, again, is a different texture that just makes every bite more exciting. You hear that crisp? This now is the moment where my heart starts beating a little bit faster because everybody wants that really nice, gooey cheese pull. So let's see what we get. Oh my God, that's incredible. Look at all the steam. Why am I whispering? Sometimes when I get really excited, I get quieter instead of louder. This is amazing. There are some foods in this world that are worth burning your mouth for. This is one of them. Ow. Oh God. My eye hurts so bad, but it's so good. Disclaimer, if your stomach gets hurt from cheese, I would skip this one. I've thought so much about the different cheeses that work together in this mac and cheese, and it's unlike any mac and cheese you've ever had.