Actually, I think most macaroni and cheese recipes use elbow macaroni and I wonder if you can even make that with the typical pasta roller.
You can’t, but pasta extruders are quite common and not that expensive.
A really nice restaurant serves American chop suey.
I recently mentioned this dish to Mrs. J., who remembers it fondly from her childhood. We just bought the fixins and will make it one of these nights.
Yeah, but IMHO, kind of a mess. Well, mine is a pain is the ass. I prefer just rolling out the dough, and cutting it with a knife. Yeah, they are uneven, but part of the joy when eating.
True, that might be an exception for even high-end restaurants, though TBF I’m not sure if mac and cheese is usually an option there.
Mac and cheese was once considered to be an extremely high form of culinary. It still can be, it’s just that most people now associate mac and cheese with the instant Kraft stuff.
There’s a big difference between using a powder, and making a béchamel from scratch.
Years ago I had lunch at the now closed Gatsby’s Diner in Sacramento. They were the sort of restaurant that was run by a good chef, has been featured on the Food Network, and generally recommended reservations for dinner.
For my lunch I ordered… the smoked chicken sandwich. On the surface that doesn’t sound much different from a sandwich you could get at someplace like Applebee’s – a smoked chicken breast with bacon, cheese, mayo, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and barbecue sauce on a Kaiser roll. But the thing that set it apart and made the sandwich from Gatsby’s an amazingly good chicken sandwich was the quality of all the ingredients. The chef actually smoked the chicken in a wood smoker out behind the restaurant with his own special blend of wood (and, I think, coffee grounds). The mayo and barbecue sauce were made in house. I’m not sure about the roll, bacon, and cheese; they probably weren’t made there but they were of the highest quality and almost certainly sourced from a good local baker, butcher, and cheese maker. The same with the vegetables.
Macaroni cheese isn’t the same kind of mainstay in the UK to begin with. The powdered stuff is in the American aisle at big supermarkets. There is a tinned version that I’m not sure anyone ever actually eats. Everyone I know who does eat it just makes it - it’s not a difficult sauce - and it’s become very popular as a refrigerated ready meal in the last ten years or so.
Genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen it on the menu at an Italian restaurant that isn’t the type that mainly lives on takeaway orders, or at least has a kids’ menu, which is definitely a sign of a restaurant not being a “nice” restaurant.
I’ve seen ‘lobster mac and cheese’ as a side dish at several high-end restaurants. I personally think adding lobster is gilding the lily; good mac and cheese is sublime without adding more stuff.
I should probably make myself clearer… I wasn’t meaning that an Italian place whose menu is very pasta-centric should be buying pasta. They should definitely be making it themselves. But a nice pizza place with a couple of pasta dishes? I’m not expecting house-made pasta for those. But I am expecting house-made pizza dough and sauce. And probably high-end cheese and cured meats.
But a non-Italian place that has a pasta dish on the menu (like say a high end seafood place with a couple of pasta dishes on the menu)? I’m not expecting scratch pasta in that case, even if it’s not a side dish. But for a high-end place, I would expect fresh pasta instead of dried.
Same with bread; plenty of places don’t necessarily make their own bread- that’s more of a different set of skills than cooking, so I don’t begrudge them getting fresh bread from a good bakery.
Same with meat- maybe a steakhouse ought to be cutting/aging their steaks in house, but I wouldn’t begrudge a high-end seafood restaurant if they got that one steak on their menu from a local butcher.
Totally agreed. With pizza places you don’t go there for the pasta so much, usually.
I just can’t think of any places in London that are primarily pizza restaurants and would count as “nice.” Lovely food, not even extremely cheap, but it wouldn’t be weird to turn up in a tracksuit or working clothes, the wine menu is basically ten items if that, it’s not unusual to see kids there, the napkins are probably paper, etc, etc.
I just want to point out that there’s a difference between house-made pasta and fresh (rather than dried) pasta. It is possible for a restaurant to buy fresh pasta from a specialty wholesaler just like they can buy bread from a bakery.
I wouldn’t expect dried pasta at a high-end restaurant - but whether they make the fresh pasta at the restaurant or buy it from a specialty company doesn’t really matter to me.
I know- I used them specifically in my examples above- not interchangeably.
A fair number of high end places here in Dallas get, or at least used to get their fresh pasta from Civello’s Raviolismo.
I would expect ANY high end place in town to get their pasta from somewhere like that, if they’re not making it themselves, like say… Lucia does. And my expectations go up with the sort of cuisine. I mean, an Italian place like Lucia SHOULD be making it themselves. But a place like Cafe Pacific? I’d expect fresh pasta, but not necessarily house made. And the same for say… Cane Rosso (a nice-ish pizza place)- their pasta should probably be fresh, but not house-made.
You remind me of a place here in Dallas that used to sell custom made ravioli. They made their own pasta and would stuff the ravioli with whatever you wanted. (You’d then take it home and cook it)
God I used to love that place. They are no longer around though.
TBF I can buy “fresh” pasta at my nearest very small supermarket too. Cooked with some just the other day. I’d be fine with any restaurant that isn’t all about the pasta (rather than the pizza) using that but if it turns out that’s what they mean by “handmade pasta” then I’d be calling bullshit.
(Except macaroni. That is genuinely really hard to make. I’d expect that to be either made on the premises or not labelled in a way that made it seem like it was).
None of the places I think of as nice would buy in their bread even from a really good bakery.
I haven’t bought a jar of pasta sauce since I was a student. Really, italian pasta dishes really don’t have many ingredients in them, and fresh tastes so much better. I’ll never forget discovering home made pesto - it’s incomparable to the awful paste in a jar
Ain’t no shame in using canned tomatoes; often they’re actually riper and higher quality than the “fresh” ones you find at the grocery store, depending on the time of year. Basically it has to do with how canned tomatoes vs. fresh tomatoes are picked, in that the canned ones are picked and canned in very close time proximity, so they can and are picked very ripe. Fresh ones are picked well in advance of their ripest point so they’ll survive shipping longer. Fresh ones can end up fully ripe, but you have to work at it sometimes, keeping them in paper bags with bananas(for the ethylene gas), etc…
I wasn’t talking about canned tomatoes - every great chef (not talking about myself) uses those. I’m talking about sauces where they’ve added all the ingredients (plus generally a ton of sugar or palm oil) together.
All true!* The only thing I’m saying is that it’s not the same level of effort.
I think there’s a tendency to say that about a lot of scratch recipes, but it’s rarely true. It’s sometimes self-deprecation (oh please, it’s no work at all), sometimes poo-pooing others (you use jarred, eh? sure, if you want, but scratch is no work at all!), and sometimes just having gotten so comfortable with a simple recipe that it really does seem as easy as pouring a jar into a saucepan.
But even basic technique is still technique, and even simple recipes are still recipes.
*It’s been mentioned already, but there is some premade stuff out there that’s pretty good. Still not as good as fresh, but worlds better than a jar of red sugar sauce.
Right, like before I ever used jarred sauce I made my own, I mentioned that in my home cooking I often use jarred now because it simply takes less time. When you come home for work, are making dinner for just yourself, and you really want to invest less than 5 minutes effort into it, jarred sauce is an obvious choice to go with. Boil some water, throw some dry pasta in there, you have a meal in 15 minutes and you probably spent 2-3 minutes actual prep time on it.
It’s competing with me swinging through the Wendy’s on the way home, it’s not competing with me putting effort into a better meal that night, I’ve already made the decision that isn’t happening.