Thou shalt not cook this dish for more than 4 hours or the pasta will disintegrate. Thou shalt not use fresh milk, because it curdles in the Crock-Pot. Thou shalt not use sweetened condensed milk instead of evaporated milk. Thou shalt not cook this dish on high or the cheese will burn. But first, I have to play Moses (or at least Chef Boyardee) for a minute and give you the Four Mac’n’Cheese Commandments: 1. If your mouth’s not watering by now, you must’ve forgotten to put your teeth in this morning. The closest I can come to describing the perfect mac’n’cheese sauce texture is to say that if you’ve ever eaten an exquisitely prepared corn pudding (the ones served at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky come to mind), you know the texture I mean. This is key, in my opinion, and in fact is key to all great pasta sauces: It has to cling to the pasta rather than floating, concentrating the flavor thickly around each elbow, but there has to be enough sauce so it isn’t simply absorbed by the pasta, leaving a dry mac’n’cheese that pleases nobody. And finally, a sauce that’s the right texture. Elbows cooked just right, so they’re fully done but still hold their shape rather than disintegrating. Plenty of luscious flavor of the cheesy, buttery, creamy variety. Mac’n’cheese with under- (ouch!) or overcooked pasta (eeeMoving on to what makes a good mac’n’cheese great: Lots of yummy, crunchy (as opposed to hard) crust to contrast with the creamy interior. Mac’n’cheese that’s bitter (a failing of many an otherwise lovely mac’n’cheese made by well-intentioned folks using globs of orange Cheddar). EeeeMac’n’cheese that’s tasteless (in this case, we’re referring to flavor, not to the Day-Glo orange color just described). (Lonely elbow-fish swimming in a sea of sauce just does not work for us. In the gross category: Mac’n’cheese that’s pretty much all mac and no cheese. Talk about fix it and forget it convenience! But trust me, no one’s going to forget it once they’ve tasted it.īefore we get to the recipe, though, let’s take a moment to discuss what distinguishes great from gross when it comes to macaroni and cheese. (Fans of mac-in-the-box, you know who you are.) Cook the pasta, put it in the Crock-Pot, stir in the other ingredients, turn it on, get along with your day. And better still, it’s made in a Crock-Pot (that’s a slow cooker, for you benighted souls who use a different brand from the one and only original), so it takes no more time and effort to make than mac’n’cheese out of a box. So I don’t even have to strive for false modesty when I tell you that it is without question the best mac’n’cheese any of us have ever eaten.
Instead, it’s the brainchild of our good friend Delilah. So, since I’m going to make it anyway, I thought I’d share the recipe with you.Ĭredit where credit is due, though: This is not a Silence Dogood original. And this is without doubt the ultimate mac’n’cheese recipe. Who doesn’t love mac’n’cheese? Deliciously satisfying in winter, yummy with a crisp salad or cole slaw and iced tea in warmer weather, it’s the ultimate comfort food. Now, mac’n’cheese hadn’t been uppermost in my mind when I was contemplating today’s menu, but hey. (See our earlier post, “The Friday Night Supper Club,” to find out all about this excellent weekly gathering.) We were conferring about what to make as the main dish when a plaintive cry arose: “Make your macaroni and cheese!!!” This week, our fabled Friday Night Supper Club is gaining a few more members as a friend’s relatives drop in from out of town. Tags: Crock-Pot recipes, macaroni and cheese, slow cookers ApPosted by ourfriendben in homesteading, recipes.
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