Baked Macaroni And Cheese

Mac and Cheese, once the staple of many a latch-key child, has gotten hip in the last 10 or so years. This uber-carb entree most associated with low cost and the blue and white box has even become the featured item on many a restaurant’s menu. There is even a pub not far from Chef Hacker Kitchen North that uses the tag line – “Home of The Mac n’ Cheese”. Their menu features 17 different types!

Although the phrase, “Lobster Mac and Cheese” evokes mouth watering images of a bubbly-rich, creamy and satisfying shellfish appetizer or entree, when most of us think mac and cheese, we think of the much simpler unadorned dish of just elbow macaroni in a cheddar Bechemel sauce that is traditionally served at family get-togethers. That is the version that inspired this recipe and a sort of a “reverse hack” which will be detailed shortly.

In fact, baked macaroni and cheese may have been one of the first dishes I ever hacked. I was invited to a party some long time ago by my best friend. I asked what I could bring and my friend, fully aware of my culinary training asked for mac and cheese. Well, during the Carter Administration, when I attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY, there was no course called “Intro to Mac and Cheese” so the best I could muster was to check the index of my copy of, “The Professional Chef, Fourth Revised Edition”. Good news! There was a recipe. Bad news. It yielded 25 pounds of pasta! But at close inspection I realized that thanks to the clever Chef’s and the exquisite curriculum at the CIA, I had learned enough to prepare each of the component parts of a drop-dead delicious Baked Macaroni and Cheese dish and that I could properly scale it from a single to an infinite number of servings. To do this I only needed to figure out the ratio of a portion of macaroni to Bechemel and then do the math!

Then It All Melted Down (Almost)

Over the years when friends asked me to share a recipe for a dish I served, I would tell them that it’s not really written down and that I often vary things. Then I’d ramble on about technique and ratios and flavor combinations. This was all true but probably not what the requester was hoping for. In fact, this happened so often that it became the catalyst for starting Chef Hacker Kitchen. For more on that look here.

Time passed and I was eventually asked for the Mac and Cheese recipe often enough that instead of my normal dissertation I decided to reverse hack my own recipe. My plan was to dive into the cook book collections of my mother, my library and my wife and to see if that “new computer program called Google” had any recipes that might help. Yea, this happened a long time ago. Then I recalled that some food packaging listed a toll free phone number that you could call to request recipes and I decided to check for one on a box of elbow macaroni.

It Was Even Easier That I Had Hoped

Right there on the back of the box was a recipe for macaroni and cheese that used the exact same ratio that I had calculated years earlier. With that I only needed to add my Au Gratin ingredients and cooking description and I was at last able to fulfill a request for a recipe in a way that was actually useful to the requester! So that is the recipe you see below and it is the basis for the video you can view on the Chef Hacker Kitchen YouTube channel.

If this is not sufficiently hacked for your liking please see what you can come up with. There are tons of options! I worked with a second cook who used ½ Bechemel and ½ Veloute as the base of his cheese sauce. Lots of folks add things like vegetables, ham or chicken as well and I’ve already written about the place with 17 types of mac and cheese on their menu. So what would your hack be? Whatever you decide, if you make a version of this dish please share it with us and include a picture! You can do so by leaving a reply below.