Don’t look at me - my attempts at Mac & Cheese consist of:
(a) Boil a box of pasta - usually Barilla medium shells or rotini (either whole wheat or tri-color)
(b) Mix in 4 cups or so of shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese, 12 ounces of milk, and one egg (or, usually, 4 ounces of egg-like product - must include the whole egg; not just egg whites)
(c) I usually put it into a casserole dish and bake, covered in foil, at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, but if I’m in a hurry, I’ll just put it on the stove and keep stirring until the cheese is melted.
It does tend to be more mac than cheese, but I never was able to make a proper Bechamel sauce.
LCD au vin
It’s really easy. I’ll walk you through my simple recipe, if it’s any help.
Put a walnut-sized chunk of butter in a pan over low heat, add flour, stir to break up any clumps, add warm milk, salt and ground nutmeg and keep stirring until it stops thickening. Ten to fifteen minutes (the longer the better, they say). That’s all there is to it.
The trick is to add enough flour to thicken the sauce suitably, but it’s better if there’s not quite enough to form clumps. The melted butter pools in the pan and the flour makes it cloudy. If there’s too much flour, clumps will form, in which case you just add a little more butter and stir to dissolve the clumps. And if the sauce turns out lumpy, you can just take an immersion blender to it (a pro cook told me that many of his colleagues do that). When I was still buying and eating butter, I often made bechamel sauce, and it wasn’t long at all before I just winged it (no measuring, etc.)
Make it a little thicker, stir in the chopped up remains of that rotisserie chicken in your fridge, add some black pepper, and you’ve got the filling for the best croquettes you’re ever had. Chill the filling to thicken it further, separate into golf-ball sized portions, coat in beaten egg, dredge in bread crumbs and pan fry in an inch or two of olive oil.
Make it anyway, for yourself. Maybe make half a recipe. I cooked for myself a lot in the 35 years I was married since Mr. Salinqmind wanted only burgerfries night after night after night. (Though eventually he did eat MY home-made mac & cheese, he confessed he really preferred the Kraft blue box kind his mommy fed him for years and years.)
Yep. I just made some yesterday for lasagna. I even used cold milk and it was fine. Just incorporate relatively slowly while whisking and you should be good to go.
The main thing I try to remember is how much roux to thicken how much liquid. With roux, it’s usually equal parts flour and butter (or other fat). And 1.5 tablespoons of flour will thicken a cup (8 oz, ~250 mL) of milk. So, for a cup of milk: 1.5Tb flour, 1.5Tb butter, 1C milk. That’s for what I would call average viscosity. If you like it thicker, go for 2Tb flour and 2Tb butter. If you like it thinner, 1Tb flour and 1Tb butter.
(Personally, I just think in terms of flour and liquid ratios, and think of it as 3:2 flour:liquid, but I wanted to be explicit above.)
Theoretically I will, it just never seems to actually happen!
Do you spend much time stirring? I ask because I usually don’t (or didn’t, because I don’t eat butter anymore), but I’ve heard repeatedly that the sauce turns out better when you stir it for 20 to 30 minutes. I learned to make béchamel in order to make croquettes, the filling of which has to be pretty thick. At the time, it seemed to me that most recipes (specifically for croquettes) called for a little too much milk and lots of stirring, which, it seemed to me, was a means of achieving the right consistency through evaporation of the water in the milk, which, of course, requires all the stirring to keep it from sticking to the pan. At that point, I started measuring the ingredients, thinking that if I didn’t overdo it with the milk, I could reduce the stirring time. But I ended up just eyeballing the ingredients, and the results were good enough. So… all that information just to ask: Do you agree that copious stirring makes a better béchamel sauce?
Oh hell no. Maybe a minute or so when I first am incorporating everything, then a little bit here and there until it comes to a near boil and starts thickening. Once it’s sufficiently thick, I let it sit in low heat for maybe ten minutes and give it a whisk midway and at the end. Total stirring time is maybe 3 minutes at the most. I usually do my bechamel in 10-15 minutes, not 30. I’m not sure why I would want to cook it that long or what additional improvements there are for keeping it that long, but I’ve never purposely tried (though I’m sure I’ve left bechamel sitting on a low flame while preparing other stuff.)
I was googling cold milk and bechamel earlier and why that’s bad, but apparently it’s not. I mean, there are sites that say use hot milk, but I found a New York Times article saying you should use cold or room temp milk. Unfortunately, it was behind a paywall so I couldn’t read it. Curious why now.
Far and away my favorite mac and cheese recipe is this one:
It’s really easy–a five-ingredient sauce (not counting the optional flavors like mustard/hot sauce/black pepper), and on the table in about 20 minutes from the time the water boils–and has a texture very similar to Kraft, but much much much better flavors. Baked mac has never really appealed to me, but this exactly hits my craving for stovetop.
As a variation, try mixing in warming spices, like cumin, cayenne, garam masala, chili powder, smoked paprika, or some combination thereof.
Just so you know, that link redirects me to Food Network UK home page, with no reference to that specific recipe. I’m in Europe. Happens often enough (other posters’ links) to be an annoyance.
Must be to prevent clumping, wouldn’t you say? I usually warmed a glass of milk in the microwave but noticed once that using cold milk doesn’t seem to be a big deal, as long as you add it little by little, stirring thoroughly.
I’m in Switzerland, and I just closed the pop-up and could reach the site.
Same recipe, different site:
Thanks, but there’s no pop-up for me. The link takes me to this page. Just thought I’d mention it, although there may be no point in doing so, as it’s just going to derail the thread and it’s apparently not a matter of carelessness.
Yeah–I’ve never heard of that happening with a food website. It sounds like some sort of localization bullshit, and is unfortunately out of my control. Not only can’t I fix it, I can’t even predict which websites will engage in that behavior. Sorry, and thanks, @Die_Capacitrix, for finding a workaround!
Very hot milk would probably lead to unfixable clumping, as the outer starches gelatinize and form a coating around the clumps before the individual flour grains could mix through the liquid. Very cold milk, though, might make it difficult to stir the flour in. That’s my guess, anyway.
Oh, duh. That’s probably the reason I started doing it with cold milk to begin with, as with a slurry you usually want to use cold or room temp liquid, so why not with a roux?
If you’re doing a slurry (just flour and liquid), you stir the liquid into the flour. It mixes fine. With a roux, the flour is incorporated into the fat, then the liquid is added, so no issues there, either.
ETA: or I should say, the slurry doesn’t contain all the liquid you are trying to thicken. You make the slurry and pour that once it’s well mixed into the liquid you want to thicken.
I can’t give you my entire recipe, but it involves Velveeta, butter, milk, eggs, and a gratin crackercrumb and cheese baked top.