Think outside the box with homemade macoroni and cheese

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Coppin' a meal

Think outside the box with homemade macoroni and cheese

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Joshua Burger-Caplan

Columnist

January 27, 2012

Some things are supposed to come in a box. Shoes are one example. Rings, computers and board games also come in boxes, as they should. But macaroni and cheese? I suppose an argument could be made for convenience. Kraft is easy, Kraft is quick, Kraft is cheap, and Kraft gathers all the ingredients you need together, packaging them in expedient, individual plastic bags. But macaroni and cheese from scratch does not take particularly long to make, none of the ingredients require much prep time, and macaroni and cheese from scratch tastes infinitely better than macaroni and cheese from a box.

It's sort of like the time that I bought a frozen pack of Wyngz.

They did not taste particularly good, and I asked myself why I hadn't bought real chicken wings, instead of a product that appeared to be created by a fourth grader using imaginative spellyngz.

So make your own macaroni and cheese using this recipe. Because if you don't, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

This recipe is loosely adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks, Amanda Hesser's "Cooking for Mr. Latte."

Ingredients:

1 lb elbow macaroni

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp flour

1 cup milk

11/2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, grated or finely chopped, plus more for crust

3/4 can of diced tomatoes

3/4 cup breadcrumbs

Step One:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Begin boiling the pasta water. Throw a handful of salt in as well, as this will be absorbed by the pasta, giving it heightened flavor and chewiness.

In a saucepan, melt the butter. Mix in the flour, but not over the burner. You should now have a sort of paste, called a roux.

Put this back on the burner set to medium. Stirring constantly to avoid burning, let this paste heat up so that it loses its viscosity and begins to bubble.

Step Two:

Add the milk a little bit at a time. Before each addition, make sure that the mixture is homogenous. You don't want any of the roux to be left at the bottom of the pan or it will burn. Keep stirring, but turn the heat down to medium low, and let simmer. You have just made a béchamel sauce, a staple of French and Italian cooking.

Step Three:

Let the béchamel simmer down until just about half of the liquid has simmered away. Then, open the can of tomatoes. Reserve the juice.

Squeeze 2/3 of the tomatoes between your fingers into the sauce. Then add the cheese in three additions, and stir so that it melts evenly. Taste the sauce. If it is not cheesy enough, add more cheese. If it is too thick, add some of the reserved tomato juice. When you are done tinkering, take the sauce off the heat.

Step Four:

Cook the pasta. You want it to be extra al dente, as it is going in the oven, so four or five minutes should do it. When you bite into the pasta at this point, it should have a white ring where you bit.

Mix the pasta with the sauce, and pour everything into an oven-ready container. Pour the bread crumbs and however much cheese you want to use onto the top.

Place this in the oven for 15 minutes, or until the top begins to bubble and brown. I like to eat this with a little sriracha, but that is totally your call.

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