Creamy Baked Mac and Cheese

Hi , everyone .

It's cooking with an as you can see if it's not obvious enough .

Baked mac and cheese for this week .

Ok .

You're gonna love it .

It's quick .

It takes about 30 to 40 minutes tops .

Um And it's something that even um reheats deliciously for the next day .

Um I wanna take a quick second to say you should take a look at the page .

What's on your plate on Facebook ?

Uh They're a nice group of people who always let me post my videos on there .

Um So look at this picture .

Come on , that's heaven .

This is life .

Do you see this macaroni and cheese ?

So creamy and delicious .

Let me show you how to make it .

Your first step is you're gonna take equal parts of butter and flour .

And as always , my ingredients are in the description box of my video .

So you're creating a root and that's the base for the sauce that you're gonna need to create for the cheese that goes in your macaroni and cheese .

Um So this step is very important because what you wanna do is you wanna mix this flour in really well and you want to cook the flour taste out and you wanna make sure that it's not clumpy .

Um It may get a little clumpy when you're adding in your cream and milk again , but you're gonna whisk away just like I'm doing here , but we're not there yet .

So let me stop rushing myself .

So , as you can see , I'm whisking really fast and that's because I don't want it to burn because when you're doing a rule , there's so many different levels and I'm at the beginner level where I just want the beginning stage of the ro a blonde , golden color as you can kind of see .

I have that going on .

Um Right now it's , it's pretty quick .

Um , if it gets darker than that blonde color that you see , it's ok .

But you , I think for a macaroni cheese , you don't want it to be darker than that because you don't want um , the color in your macaroni unless you do .

I don't know .

But , um , what you're gonna do is , um , you season it with some salt and pepper like I'm doing now at this stage , you could , if you wanted to add um , ground mustard , I didn't do it because I didn't have any available .

I mean , I probably did , I just couldn't find any .

So whisk away and make sure you cook all that flour out because you don't want that taste in your mac and cheese .

So here we go .

Now I'm adding in my cream , my heavy cream and milk mixture .

Little by little .

Ok .

Um , this is a process where you need to , like , beat this real hard , like , it owes you money .

I'm talking about don't walk away from it .

Um , because if you do it's gonna burn and it's gonna taste gross and you don't want that to happen .

So you're gonna whisk really quickly and if you can see some of that clump from the flower came up , that's ok because now I'm gonna whisk like a psychopath , I'm gonna whisk like I just ran into someone who owes me $50 and they're buying like scratch tickets when they should be paying me back .

That's how you wanna to whisk this just keep going even if your wrist hurts , stop what you're doing .

Who cares if someone needs your help in the house , tell them to shut up because you have something to mix .

And if they want to eat tonight , be quiet because that's what I do when I'm making my macaroni and cheese , I don't wanna be bothered .

Ok .

So now if you look here this step , it's starting to get a little thicker .

Ok ?

Just a little bit thicker , but we need a little thicker than that .

Ok ?

And now this is where you need it .

You see where it's bubbling up a little bit .

Don't think that I walked away from it and I wasn't paying attention .

I was standing right there the whole time So I'm letting it bubble up just a little bit .

OK ?

And then I'm gonna go in there with the whisk .

If you wanna add in a little more salt and pepper to your taste , you can go ahead and do so now .

OK .

So here I am whisking away .

Whisking away .

I want it to be really , really thick as you can see when I'm whisking .

Can you see the liquid , the beam sauce ?

It's actually sticking to the bottom of the pan .

So that's why it's so important that when it gets to the stage , you keep whisking and whisking whisking and you don't stop .

Ok .

Now , obviously you wanna have some really good quality cheese because if you want a good tasting macaroni and cheese , you need a good quality .

Um If all you have on hand is that pre shredded type fine , you go ahead and make it , but I'm telling you one of these days you need to make it with something that melts really well .

In this particular recipe , I use a sharp New York um yellow cheddar and I used a , I believe , a sharp bite Vermont um cheddar .

So you can use any kind of cheese as long as it's a melting cheese .

Obviously , you need to use a melting cheese .

So let me show you what I do for the next step .

So now I already have my cheese grated because I did that beforehand and I put in it little by little and , um , I mix it up slowly .

Generally I would actually , um , keep whisking , whisking my cheese in , um , while the pots on the burner because it melts better .

But my daughter was in the kitchen with me when I was doing this and sometimes I like to , um , stay away from the oven when she's next to me because she wants to be so close .

I get nervous with the heat .

So , in this case , I'm , I'm having to whisk like extra hard just to make sure the cheese doesn't melt .

So to make this easier , you want to keep it on the stove where it's still warm .

Um Not on the burner but like , you know , on the stove where it's still warm and it's making it easier for you to melt your cheese .

Now , I'm really stressing how important it is to have a good quality cheese because if you use a cheese that's cheap , sometimes it can actually come out grainy and no one likes a grainy mac and cheese or it can kind of taste processed .

And of , of course , if you're going through all this trouble , you want it to be delicious .

So just try your best to use the best cheese that you can buy .

All right .

So as you can see here , the cheese is melted and it's nice and creamy , there's no grainy texture in there .

Um And you're gonna see by the end result , what I mean about how creamy this mac and cheese actually looks , it's , it's really delicious .

So of course , you know , while my sauce was going , I was also boiling my pasta .

You wanna boil it less than al dente , I would say about five minutes because you , you don't want to overcook the pasta when you put it in the oven because this is a baked mac and cheese .

So you , you wanna definitely undercook it when you're boiling it .

OK ?

Don't , don't cook it the same amount of time you would if you were eating it as pasta because then it's gonna be real mushy .

I mean , you want it to hold its um shape and texture um even after being baked , but look at all that cheese and you know what , there's been times I don't want to wait for it to be baked and I've eaten it just the way you see it here and it's so good .

It's really , really good .

Um And if that's the way you want to eat it , you wanna stop here , that's OK .

But um at least one of these days I feel like I'm saying that 1000 times in this video try it um baked because I mean , everyone has to have baked mac and cheese once in their life .

It's really my guilty pleasure .

So it's funny because at this next step , obviously I've buttered my pan to get my macaroni and cheese in there .

And what you're gonna do is you're gonna empty all your pasta in there .

At this point .

I actually , uh , my camera died and you'll see because it cuts off when I'm doing the last step .

So I'm just gonna explain that to you .

Now , after I have all my macaroni in my , um pan , that's buttered .

Ok .

I'm not sprayed .

Use real butter .

Come on .

Don't worry about the fat content right now .

You have so much saturated fat in there .

Um , a butter dish isn't gonna kill you .

All right .

So you take some melted butter , more melted butter and you put it in a , in a little bowl and then you take uh some panko bread crumbs and you put that with the melted butter and you mix it up really good and then you top your macaroni and cheese with it and then you take some paprika , smoked paprika , whatever you want and you Sprinkle it on top of that .

Generally I would use way more crumb topping , but again , I didn't have enough panco bread crumbs .

So , um you'll see what that looks like at the end because it's about to cut off as I'm showing you what I'm doing .

So you see that's the panco bread crumbs and then it'll just stop , but I'm gonna show you what it looks like when it's done and comes out of the oven , you're gonna love it .

So this is what it looks like when it comes out of the oven .

Delicious , beautiful the paprika gives it color .

All right , I promise you all , you're gonna love it .

Ok ?

And if you try the recipe and like it , let me know , always do me a favor , like share and subscribe to my videos if you haven't done so already .

And I appreciate all of the positive feedback that I've ever gotten from all of my subscribers and I love you all .

Thanks for watching .

Bye .