I love mac and cheese. It’s a weakness, and we tried a few different recipes before finding one in the Tupperware “25 Pasta Creations Your Family Will Love” cookbook that won the contest, hands down. As with everything we made, we changed things up a bit and doubled the recipe, but here’s the recipe as it comes out of the book (our modifications will be in brackets):
8 oz./ 225g of dried pasta
3 tbsp butter (we use unsalted)
3 tbsp all purpose flour
2 cups whole milk (we always use 1% because it’s what we have, and it works just fine)
1 tsp dry mustard (we add to taste)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce (we add to taste)
Dash of Tabasco sauce (we add to taste)
1.5 cups of grated cheddar cheese (we use a combination of 5-year aged cheddar, tomato and basil Havarti and dry Asiago, grated fresh)
0.5 cup plain bread crumbs (we started off using Twistos in the Asiago flavour, but they didn’t reheat well, so we switched our topping to R.W. Garcia Dippers in English Cheddar, and they’re perfect.)
- Preheat oven to 350F/176C
- Cook pasta, drain, and place in a 16″x9″ baking dish
- Melt butter in a 3 quart sauce pan. Whisk in flour until it form a paste. Cook flour mixture for two minutes. Add milk, whisking until smooth. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly until sauce thickens and coats the back of a spoon. Reduce the heat to medium. Add mustard, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. Stir in cheese until melted and sauce is smooth.
- Pour cheese sauce over pasta and fold together until well blended. Top evenly with bread crumbs, Bake 30 minutes until hot and bubbly, and topping is golden brown.
We usually fry up some fresh bacon chunks from the butcher and fold them in with the cheese sauce. It adds weight and extra flavour to the dish, and who doesn’t like a little bacon in everything they eat? This is a winner, and everyone we’ve made it for has given us rave reviews. Try it, and let me know what you think.