Hey , dude , I'm , and today I'm cooking where I making an old fashioned mac and cheese .
This is a great holiday side dish or it could be a vegetarian main dish if you're into meatless Monday .
But you still want to have a cheesy Monday .
Ok .
So you wanna get some macaroni .
This is the mac part .
So I'm gonna use a small elbow because that's classic .
So , go ahead and get a big pot of water .
Well , you don't need that much water but get some water boiling .
So we're gonna cook this in a little bit .
But first we'll make our cheesy sauce .
So if you've ever made uh gravy , like uh sausage gravy or anything like that , you've basically also made cheesy sauce .
So we're gonna start out , we're just making a beam and then we'll add three different cheeses for the , we'll start out with a roux , which means we start out with some butter .
So I've got my butter in a sauce pan here .
We're gonna melt that over medium heat .
Once that's melted , we can whisk in some flour .
So this is all purpose flour and get that cooked for maybe 60 seconds or So until it starts to smell a little bit nutty and toasty .
And then we can add some seasonings with salt and some dry mustard , which you could leave out if you don't keep it on hand or you could add a little squirt of regular yellow mustard .
And I'm gonna use white pepper because my grandma always used white pepper whenever she would make macaroni cheese because it blends in to the sauce nicer and doesn't leave a little flicks .
But you can use black pepper too .
It won't make a big difference .
Then we can add in our milk .
And if your diet will allow , you can do extra creamy and use whole milk .
But I'm using a 2% milk .
Here , we start out by whisking in about half the milk , make sure there's no lumps and let it bubble a little bit to start to thicken and then we can add the rest of the milk .
We're just gonna cook this until it starts to thicken .
And then once that flour started to thicken up the sauce , we can turn the heat off and stir in our cheese .
So I'm using a mix here , I'm using some sharp cheddar that's gonna make it , you know , be cheesy and cheddar and I'm using some go because melts really , really well and makes a nice smooth cheese sauce .
And then I'm using some Parmesan for a little bit of extra saltiness and nutty cheesy flavor .
As soon as you add the cheese , the sauce thickens up quite a bit too , even though it's off the heat .
So you get your cheeses mixed in and then you can just set your sauce aside while we cook the noodles .
So once the water comes to a boil , you wanna add the noodles in and whatever the package says , cut that in half .
So if it says like six minutes do three minutes or something , we really just want parboil these noodles so that when they're in the oven , there's room for them to like soak up all the cheesy sauce and they'll finish cooking in the oven .
So now we can drain the noodles and then you just wanna mix your drained noodles in with the sauce .
Don't rinse your noodles and don't , you don't even really need to drain them that well .
Like you don't need to make sure they're dry anything .
A little bit of moisture on there is great .
So we mix that all together and then we're just gonna pour it into an oil dish .
Sprinkle some bread crumbs on top .
If you want to add a little more cheese , you can do that on top too and we'll bake it at 3 50 for 20 to 30 minutes until it's nice and golden and ok , bubbly nice .
Crispy brown top looks gorgeous .