Mac and Cheese for Grownups
All-American Comfort Food: Macaroni & Cheese (with a Blue Twist)
Easy-from-Scratch: Maytag Blue Kicks Up Traditional Cheddar Mac & Cheese. Maybe your kids will love it. If not, save it for when it's just you two. Mac & Cheese party?
Is Mac and Cheese the all-American comfort food? Arguable, but wasn’t it Yankee Doodle who called his hat (or the feather he stuck in it) “macaroni”?
What would you bet that a trip to the pantry in the vast majority of households with children would discover one or two blue boxes of that dessicated “just-add-milk” mix. The kids love it.
But you’re an adult now (at least according to your driver’s license). You deserve more flavor, something with real ingredients. You deserve not just honest-to-goodness cheddar, but a kick of something like Maytag blue, too. For maybe ten minutes more prep time than the blue box, you'll be amazed by the difference.
Fear not. You won’t be calling the lonely Maytag repairman, except maybe to invite him over for dinner.
Mac & Maytag Blue Cheese
- 1 lb macaroni or penne or your favorite pasta tubes
- 2 Tbsp butter
- 1/4 cup flour
- 2 cups whole milk
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 3 cups sharp or extra sharp Tillamook (or your favorite) cheddar cheese
- 1 1/2 cups Maytag (or other) blue cheese
- salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste.
- ½ cup more blue cheese! (because you deserve it)
Optional Toppings:
- Crisp cooked bacon, crumbled
- Snipped chives
- Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter a 9x13 glass baking dish.
- In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook the pasta, stirring occasionally, until al dente (tender, but still firm to the tooth), about 8 minutes. Drain well.
- (Measure out your milk and cream before starting this step.) Meanwhile, in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat, melt butter. Stir in the flour and cook just a scant minute, stirring constantly. Do not let it brown.
- Gradually whisk in the milk and cream. Allow it to just simmer, not boil, whisking occasionally until it thickens, about 3 minutes. Reduce heat to low.
- Stir in the cheeses until their well melted in. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper. Tasting as you cook is always important, but especially here. If you’re using a different blue cheese, their inherent saltiness varies all over the block. White pepper is an alternative to black if you want a more homogenous color in the finished dish.
- Stir drained pasta into the sauce until well coated. Scoop the mixture into the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle with the last half cup of blue cheese and put it in the oven, uncovered. (Give yourself permission to lick the sauce pot. What the heck. The cook has priveleges. Or, maybe there’s a pair of hungry eyes peeking around the kitchen doorway…)
- Bake until bubbly, about 25 minutes.
- Add optional toppings if you like and serve.
Yield: 8 servings
Notes: You can kick up any scratch-made mac & cheese recipe by substituting blue cheese for about a third of the cheese that the recipe calls for.
For an Italian version of this comfort food, try Polenta with Three Cheeses. Come to think of it, since Italians have been making Gorgonzola for roughly a thousand years, maybe mac and cheese is our version of their cheesy polenta!
For some other blue cheeses, check out Eleven French Blue Cheeses Compared.
