Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.If you’ve ever reheated mac and cheese only to end up with a greasy mess, you know exactly what I mean. While the sauce will thicken as it cools, the sodium citrate will prevent it from curdling or separating, especially when it is reheated. Once melted, add your cooked and drained pasta and the ground beef mixture and stir until everything is evenly coated with cheesy goodness. It should be plenty hot to melt all 8 ounces of cheese, but you can return it to low heat if necessary (one of the benefits of sodium citrate, remember, it’s ok to get hot!) You can use the same pan that you used for the beef, in fact I recommend it as you’ll infuse the sauce with flavor leftover from the spiced beef.īring the milk to a simmer, then turn off the heat and add your cheese, a handful at a time. Instead of a roux, which cooks flour with fat (and more often than not comes out oddly chunky), we make a paste of flour and a bit of milk, then add that to the pan with the rest of the milk. When using sodium citrate you don’t technically need the flour, however I think a little bit helps thicken the sauce and improves the mouthfeel (sometimes these kinds of cheese sauces can feel a bit plasticky). This recipe is technically a hybrid of a roux-based and a modernist-style mac ‘n cheese, using both flour and sodium citrate to produce a ridiculously creamy cheese sauce. The next day, reheat the components separately and then mix it altogether and it’ll be as good as if it were made fresh.) The pasta does absorb a lot of liquid overnight, so the next day it won’t be quite as saucy, but it’ll still be creamy and not greasy in the least (alternatively, if you want to preserve the sauciness, spoon out half your sauce, meat, and pasta and store in separate containers. It also reheats beautifully, compared to the greasy, separated mess that leftover mac and cheese often becomes (ew).
#Is mac and cheese best served fresh skin
It stays creamier for longer keep it warm and, despite a little bit of skin forming, the sauce will stay luscious and smooth as long as you need it to. Cheddar, gruyere, fontina, and havarti are some of my favorites, but I’ve also made stellar macs with brie and even a touch of parmesan or pecorino for a really pronounced flavor. You can pretty much use any cheese you want, as long as it’ll melt. Why use Sodium Citrate?Ĭheese sauce made with sodium citrate comes together more easily and without the hassle of a roux or the worry of the sauce breaking or separating. Just go buy a tub of it right now while you’re thinking about it, then you’ll always have it on hand for when the cheese craving hits you. This method was popularized with the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks, wherein they basically extracted the ingredient that makes processed cheese creamy (aka sodium citrate) and added that to high quality cheeses to make a lusciously smooth cheese sauce for the best mac and cheese you’ll ever taste. The magical ingredient that will allow you to achieve the ultimate creamy shells and cheese and use any cheese you want. Not that it doesn’t taste like cheese, rather it tastes like cheese that’s trying too hard to taste like cheese, if that makes sense?Įnter… sodium citrate.
Not to mention the greasy mess you’ll end up with if you try to reheat it the next day.Īnd while I love the beautifully creamy texture of boxed mac and cheese mix or mac made with a block or pouch of processed cheese product, the cheese flavor is always a bit… lacking. Texture is everything, and most roux-based recipes just don’t do it for me, going all pasty and weird within minutes of serving.
I am very particular about my mac and cheese. Cheesy, spicy, perfection served atop a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce. But getting the right proportions of cheese sauce to pasta, not to mention the right amount of spice in the meat… took some effort to fine tune.īut all that work is totally worth it when the result is nothing short of perfection. Which might seem like a lot of work for a recipe that is, in actuality, quite simple. We made this recipe upwards of half a dozen times. No matter how creamy it starts, as it cools the sauce will no longer have the same visual appeal… and that sort of time-sensitive recipe makes for a very stressful photo shoot. I swear, mac and cheese is harder to photograph than ice cream the time between a perfectly rich and creamy sauce and a congealed mess feels like mere seconds. Served atop of bed of crisp iceberg lettuce it’s ever so satisfying. Taco shells and cheese is a truly pun-derful recipe, featuring mini pasta shells smothered in a rich and creamy cheese sauce, swirled with spicy seasoned ground beef. Mac and cheese meets American-style beef tacos in this melty mashup of epic proportions.