Maybe make a white sauce and stir the cheese into it?
Quite possibly, yes, it was a recipe problem. In my old cheddar and parm recipe, I stirred the cheese and milk together (after making a roux) on the stovetop until melted/blended and then poured over the macaroni and baked. Constant stirring and it took a while to get fully melted/blended instead of streaky orange (maybe streaky is okay? - no idea, I’m not that much of a cook and had never made it before then). I now use this recipe, and it’s much easier. Milk thickens, pull off heat, and the cheese melts in in a matter of minutes with stirring. Pour on noodles, then bake.
Bah. I love all cheese. Everything has it’s place. I have a small fridge in my office at work. A slice of the Kraft Deluxe is just fine for a quick sandwich with ham and tomatoes. Some folks, I think need to get over it. I generally have at least three $15-$30/lb cheese in the home fridge for a snack.
I also drink cheep beer and real good beer. I’m not going to take a very nice Hefeweizen out to mow the freaking lawn. I’ll save that for guitar practice.
Oh, look - it’s a cheese snob!
Sorry - “processed cheese” is actual cheese. As noted already in this thread, it’s a combination of 2 or more cheeses, or mixed together bits of one cheese, but it’s all real cheese.
All the other stuff you list is, arguably, fake cheese.
I’m happy to remove processed cheese from my snark then.
I did buy some weird brand of extremely cheap slices once. They were terrible - tasted terrible, bad texture, the works. I agree that Kraft and other decent brands of pretend cheese slices really are good when that’s what you want.
I’m not a cheese snob, just a no-lying-in-advertising snob.
So you know what to buy. Cool. I can make some really good sandwiches with just a few ingredients. At least good enough for a work lunch. A recent development is roast beef, cream cheese and tomatoes on dark rye. It’s excellent.
I agree with the lying in advertising with pretty much any company that says their new Cross-Over ‘4x4’ is going to take you, your two Golden Retrievers, two kids and 4 kayaks over mountain tops and go camping. Divorce lawyers must love these adds.
“When you don’t get what you want, you get experience”.
But… It will do that! (Badly and uncomfortably, but it will.)
To make it similar to the cheese situation, the 4x4 manufacturers would have to advertise “has a V6 engine” when actually it’s an inline 4 that has a letter V and a number 6 stamped on it. 
Man, add some roasted red peppers to that sandwich and replace cream cheese with Vermont Cheddar…yum!
I hope nobody interpreted any of my posts as snobbery. Yes, I recognize that the stuff poured into little plastic envelopes is inferior… but it’s also what I use for my typical lunch sandwich, because it’s cheap and easy.
I’m glad you found such delight in an elder cheddar. On occasion I’ve used my elder cheddars in such a manner (making it an ingredient rather than eating it on its own) and it really is mind-blowing, especially on a good sourdough.
Got any other plans for your aged treasure?
There’s nothing wrong with cheap and easy. I think I was the snob suspect. But like I said I’m an anti-liar snob not an anti-Singles snob.
Is it the color or the taste of “orange cheese” that your grandmother prefers? If it’s the taste, you won’t be able to reproduce it with some other variety of orange cheese. If it’s the color, you can use any cheese you like and add your own coloring.
As far as I know, all deep orange cheeses get their color from added coloring. One of the most common additives is annatto, AKA achiote, the seed of a tropical plant. You can find it in Mexican markets, but if you’re just going for color it would be easier to use plain old food colorings (I assume you can still get them in most grocery stores, although I haven’t looked for them in ages). Be careful, though - too much color, or the wrong color, will give you something too ugly to eat with your eyes open.
Some orange cheeses include Mimolette, Double Gloucester, Colby (AKA Longhorn), and Red Leicester. I don’t know how well these would work in mac and cheese. If you want to try Mimolette, try to get it young (I think aged Mimolette would be too hard to melt well). Shropshire Blue is very orange (except for the veins), but I’d think blue cheese would be overwhelmingly strong in mac and cheese.
Cheap and easy has its place, and I think if you ate nothing but haute cuisine all the time it could get as boring as anything else. Easy-melt faux cheese and the like were invented because they served a need (making cheesy sauces easier to create) or filled a need (quick, easy, cheap lunch you can take to work). Nothing wrong with any of that.
If you’re looking for genuine yellow-orange cheese, good luck. Originally certain cheeses (particularly cheddar) were much more yellow and even orange in the spring, after the cows had been grazing on new growth which was laden with beta-carotene, the same pigment which colors carrots. This resulted in milk and thus cheese which had shades of this hue. And customers tended to think this cheese was superior in flavor and nutrition. And there’s even evidence that it was a bit more nutritionally rich thanks to the new growth.
But this color varied over the season, and most often the cheese was just plain old white. Early manufacturers wanted to standardize the color, and started dyeing the cheese with annatto.
I don’t know if you can find cheddars that are naturally higher in beta carotenes or not; I’ll need to inquire of my local cheesemeesters.
I believe annatto is what they use to color cheese
Kraft is responsible for orange cheese macaroni. Most people grew up eating Kraft macaroni. I still like it once in awhile.
Homemade mac and cheese is a pale yellow.
But, it can be dyed orange, with food coloring, if that’s what you want
In what way is Kraft responsible? The practice of dyeing cheddar orange pre-dated Kraft’s founding, much less their manufacturing of a mac and cheese product. And people have been using colored cheddar to make mac and cheese ever since there was colored cheddar.
I’ve been using Colby for my macaroni and cheese for about 50 years. All Colby isn’t created equal though. Farmer John’s (whose Colby is also sold with the Shullsburg Creamery label) is the best and melts very nicely. It’s the Colby of my childhood. Some more commercial Colbys don’t work as well. I cut mine into 1 inch cubes, toss it in the béchamel, put the lid on the pan and let the contained heat melt the cheese. Stir it up, add the cooked macaroni, pour into the casserole dish and bake.
It turns out you can buy annatto extract on line. This is the first vendor I found when I did a search. There may be better prices or products out there.
One problem with annatto seeds is that they’re very hard. Even a coffee mill won’t grind them very fine. The extract should be easier to use in mac and cheese.