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Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. National average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discount is not available in all states and situations. Hey rest of you listeners. We are planning a special mailbag episode and we want no need to hear from you. We have thrown a lot of information at you so
we want to know. Do you have any questions about anything we've cooked so far this season? The second thing we want to know is what are your pantry and kitchen essentials? If someone is brand new to cookie or setting up their first kitchen, what are the must-haves? And we'll share ours too of course. We have a few ways that you can get in touch with us. Number one, post and tag us at Kenji and Deb on Instagram or TikTok. Send us a DM if you're shot.
And for more information, email us at the recipe with Kenji and Deb at gmail.com. You can send us a message or a voice note. And finally you can leave us a voice mail at 202 709 7606. We're so excited to hear from you. Thanks in advance. So Deb, you made one of my recipes. Which one did you make? I made that three ingredients, stovetop one. Yeah, the three ingredients one is the one I do now. There's also like a seven four ingredient one like a many, a many ingredient
version. Which is the version from when I was still, you know, single. I had a lot of time to make stuff. I think we both have our like pre-kid and post-kid versions of recipes. This is probably the one you came up with that like on a Monday night with like two crying children at 6.30 PM. My three ingredient one came from when I had not two kids but one kid, yes. It was definitely like a what's an easier way to make this. There's got to be another way. I don't have time for this.
From Brady Atopia from PRX, welcome to the recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of Food Lab and the walk and a columnist from the New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen and she's also the author of three really good best selling cookbooks. We're both professional home cooks, which means we can and will make the same dish 57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe.
And on this show, we want to pull back the curtain on the recipe development process to show you a little bit about what goes into developing a perfect recipe so that you can figure out what works best for you. This week we're talking about the pragmatism and the pitfalls of stove top mac and cheese. That's next on the recipe with Deb and Kenji. That's correct. Have you ever owned something that inspired you to up your game? Maybe a chef grade range made you want to hone your cooking skills?
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2% on all other Apple Card with Apple Pay purchases, and 1% on anything you buy with your titanium Apple Card or virtual card number. Visit apple.co slash card calculator to see how much you can earn. Apple Card is sheet by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch, subject credit approval, term supply. Dev, can you tell me a little bit about your recipe development process? What's the first thing that you do when you start working on a recipe? I start with a very specific craving.
I'm hungry and I want to make something and I don't have a go-to recipe for it and it bothers me. My cravings come with very specific instructions. Usually, what I run into is every time I make it A happens or B happens or I hated this recipe I made this time. It basically is not a happy place. It's a grumpy place. It's a litany of grievances I've had with previous versions I've made of something and then I'm going from there to say, well, how would I like to make it?
What do I wish this recipe would do that it's not doing already? That's where I start. It's like a grumpy stain on your soul that you want to turn into a happy one. It totally is. How is it work for you, Kenji? Do you start with a craving or is it starting somewhere else for you? Recipe inspiration comes from various different places. These days, especially now that I have two kids, it's like, what am I cooking at home? What's useful for me? Sometimes it is the same as you.
It's like, okay, I have these recipes. I've made this dish before but there's this little niggling thing that makes it a pain in the butt to make. I wish I had a recipe that didn't involve this step or I wish I had a recipe that streamlined it a little bit more or I wish I had a recipe that synthesized all the things that I like about this dish in one sort of foolproof way. It's like a fun problem to solve.
It's like, here's the thing that I know people at home have trouble with because they've written to me about it or it's like, here's the thing that's like, all right, I've made this dish a hundred times so it's easy for me. But how do I put myself in the shoes of another home cook or someone who's completely brand new to this dish and what problems are they going to have and how can I solve those problems?
Something you mentioned when you were talking about your recipe development is something that I feel really lucky to have two, both of us because we've been on the internet and been sharing recipes and books and online for years.
One thing that we have the advantage of or disadvantage depending on how you think about it is that we have the voice of thousands of people in our head as they've given us feedback on what they are willing to do, what they do not want to do, what they hate to do and what do they hate that we write into recipes. I feel like it can be very helpful. Like, I know what cheeses people feel okay buying and what pasta shapes like nobody can find.
Yes. What questions are going to come up like as soon as it's milk, can I use skim milk, can I use oat milk, can I use almond milk, you know, so in a way, I feel like you and I both have this unique advantage of getting to write better recipes from it. One of the big advantages of writing a recipe online is that you don't have the fixed audience that a magazine has, you know, a magazine has a fixed subscriber ship and so you're always writing your recipes for the same group of people.
And so in some ways that's an advantage because you know what kind of recipes like a cook solicited, at least, you know, when I was there in the early 2000s, like, I knew what the readership wanted and you know that they're not going to go out to this specialty grocery store to buy a chote d'ara, an auto with coloring, you know, whereas online, whatever you're interested in, you can find an audience for that.
And you're also able to find an audience that's going to be willing to do, you know, a certain amount of work or have access to things that a magazine audience might not have. The disadvantage though is that you also reach everybody and so like no matter how good something, how much you work on something and how proud you are, something like, well, first of all, who it might not work for, right? You have a broader audience.
So it might not work for some people in which case you do have to go back and reconsider, but you're also just going to find people who want to say angry things no matter what you do, you know, there's many more comments, but that also means that there's like a bigger pool of negative comments that come through with that. It's true. And you have to like protect yourself from that and like not let it get to your head too much at the same time.
I find it very helpful to know where people struggle with recipes. I've never had somebody tell me that they could not successfully make a room before, but I know if we're talking about whipping egg whites, it comes up all the time. The people struggle with it or an emulsion of like, you know, if you're trying to make mayo or stuff like that. I find it really helpful. I consider it like free product research that will help us write better recipes.
Yeah. I think it's part of the job is getting feedback. Fortunately, I feel like the vibes that's been kitchen are very good and I want to give credit to that because it's a very nice place. Kenji, why did we decide that we want to do our very first podcast ever on Stovetop Mac and Cheese? Well, a couple of reasons.
First of all, I think there's some really interesting sort of technical bits when it comes to Mac and Cheese, you know, there's like stuff we can talk about why cheese melts smoothly or why sometimes Mac and Cheese comes out greasy or lumpy or like how do you reheat Mac and Cheese? That's always like a problem, right? Because the pasta absorbs water, you know, that. So for a recipe with relatively few ingredients, there's a lot of sort of interesting technical things going on.
But for me, it's also because it's like one of like the, I don't know, five dishes that my daughter, that my six year old can like make from scratch. It's like a thing that even people who've never cooked or who are very young or who may be never cooked until they were adults, like you're in college, what's the first thing you're going to cook? It's like, I'm going to learn how to make Mac and Cheese. But it can be highly technical if you want it to be.
To be honest, that like bake Mac and Cheese gets all the attention and deservedly so. It's, you know, it's epic, it's decadent, it feeds a crowd. Like nobody's forming a line in front of a pot of like the orange stuff. But I think there's something like really utilitarian about it and it's very essential and it's quick comfort food. It's like, it's supposed to be like you should be able to eat it within 15 minutes of deciding that you're going to need cheesy carbs for dinner.
Like it should just be something you make quickly. It's like there's a snow day and you just went sledding and you come back inside and you're like, what are you going to have for lunch? It's like, I'm making Mac and Cheese. Yeah. It's definitely not a salad. It's going to be ready in 10 minutes. Exactly. And my feeling was that, yes, I definitely have tremendous nostalgia for the boxed blue stuff.
But I also just, I'm sure you and I both know as recipe developers and as people who make it all the time that you could make something from scratch and just a couple ingredients just as quickly if you knew how to make it and what to make of somebody could go ahead and write that recipe. You might find that you like it even more because it's a little more tweakable when you do it yourself. And also you don't have to run out to the store because you probably already have the ingredients.
I've got to say as a recipe developer also, you know that there are certain recipes that are like guaranteed hits as far as if I write about this, people are going to read it right and people are going to look for the recipe and like, you know, Mac and cheese scrambled eggs. Like there's some things where it's like, if I write this recipe, people are going to look at the video, people are going to read the article and like Mac and cheese is way pretty way. Like this is fan service.
This is a definitely because when I find really funny because you say that and yet that is also for me something that I have historically resisted. Like I started my site in 2006 and yet I did not publish a quick essential stove top mac and cheese recipe until 2018 because I tend to be resistant. I tend to feel like well, everyone has a recipe for that. What am I going to add that's any different?
Actually that place where I think what am I going to add to it is exactly where I start my recipe development. Most of what's out there about this recipe is accurate and like good and I don't really have too much to say other than, hey, I tested in here as a version I like, right? Absolutely. That's sometimes the case.
And then sometimes you run into recipes where it's like, okay, yeah, like there's this problem that I have historically had with this and other people have had with it and you find that problem and you find a solution for it and that's pretty cool too. So let's talk Mac and cheese. Like where was your head when you started working on your spit and kitchen Mac and cheese recipe? What about your essential stove top mac and cheese here?
Not like one of the many other mac and cheese recipes unspent in the kitchen. So many mac and there are so many ways to put pasta with cheese and I'm not going to stop here. But this quick essential stove top mac and cheese came from actually a strict like a very sharp nostalgia for the craft box mac and cheese. I absolutely adored it growing up. We didn't get to have it very much.
I've learned the term recently, it's called an ingredient household, but we didn't have a lot of box of package food growing up. So there are four. Yes, we had an ingredient household like there's there's cheese, there's butter. You can make it yourself. But we did get to have craft mac and cheese, but never often enough. It was actually the meal my mom would make if we had babysitters coming over. A babysitter.
It is a like a kids friends coming over meal for us also because it's like saying that you know, like if you say do you want mac and cheese like the kids are going to say yes. I've been burned a couple times in fact where I made homemade mac and cheese and they're like this is not the same as at my house. The box stuff at least is the same as at their house and that your kids friends are going to eat it.
The reason why I actually started having boxed mac and cheese around with my second kid is that my daughter would have go to sleepovers and she would have play dates at friends houses and she would then come home and be disappointed that we did not have the small white shells and cheese that she had grown accustomed to. You're talking Annie's here though. I'm talking about the Trader Joe's knockoff of any I don't mind it. Okay. Got it. That is for the orange tubes from craft.
Do you have a particular nostalgia at Kenji for box mac and errone and cheese too? I do. So we did have quite a bit of the box craft dinner. My mom would always doctorate so she would always add extra butter and a couple extra slices of American cheese. So it was creamier and like if you followed back box mac and cheese technology later on Velvita introduced one where you squeeze out a little packet of stuff instead of having the orange power of the craft does.
So it was called the Velvita deluxe version which is gooey or creamier. That's what regular box mac and cheese tastes like if you add extra American cheese and extra butter to it. Yes. I definitely had nostalgia for it. Down to the putting a single macaroni tube on each time of your fork. Were you even a kid if you didn't do that with your macaroni and cheese like those two thin tubes?
So for me when I was working on my I have a couple of stovetop mac and cheese recipes but the goal with them is always like okay there's this flavor memory you have of craft mac and cheese and if you have craft mac and cheese now it basically tastes like what you
remember it as I think but it does sort of yeah lack a little bit of like complexity from better cheeses I guess I don't want to put down American cheese but cheeses that have like a little bit more flavor to them my goal with my recipes is to sort of capture
first of all the ease of the stovetop mac and cheese right it has to be something that can come together in the time it takes to boil the pasta right like that's one of the big appeals but then have a little bit more flavor to it but I think it also needs kind of the gooeyness for me.
So that's really and I think this is definitely one of the places where our recipe is sort of cleave apart a little bit and I think it actually now that we're tacked medic goes back to childhood because when they started introducing that deluxe mac and cheese I
did not like it it was too goopy for me so for me I I feel like the deluxe the creamier versions were missing the saltiness and the buttery impact you'd get when you added butter to the orange cheese powder packet but when I think of like minus stahlja for junk food
like almost all of it the theme that goes between them is orange cheese powder it's cheetos it's de-redo minus stahlja was for that powder cheese packet and so when I started thinking about like what do I want from a stovetop mac and cheese I wanted I always liked the butter
the milk that kind of idea of a brew I'm sure there's thickeners and with the orange cheese powder that like gives it that yeah exactly like to give it a little bit of body and I wanted that and I also just really liked the sharp saltiness of it which is how in
my quick essential stovetop mac and cheese I actually use either all or part parmesan in it or pecorino because I felt like it had the salty impact where you didn't need as much of it to get that like pow that pop of cheesiness most of the time when I make
it I use a mix of sharp white cheddar which I'm an orange cheddar but no I usually use a mix of like a sharp age white cheddar and Parmesan or pecorino but I usually go half half with it but to me I can use small amounts of that and get a nice cheesy salty pop without
having to use a ton but talk to me about your stovetop mac and cheese because you use different cheeses and so you know some mine you know I use a three ingredient method and you know I was working on a recipe for serious seeds for cacio pepe for a while and as
you know the the difficulty in cacio pepe and pepe is that the cheese tends to clump up right and so you know the trick is you you want like pretty concentrated pasta water and then you kind of got to be a little bit delicate when you're adding the cheese in as far
as heat goes so that you don't get the cheese all curdled and all clumpy but so I was thinking all right so I have this cacio pepe recipe where I'm really concentrating the pasta water to get it a little bit extra starchy and then adding the cheese and off heat
and twirling it around and it's essentially like it's a form of mac and cheese you know and so my idea was like okay well if we're doing it that way with cacio pepe can you make it make the same technique work for a stovetop mac and cheese like a gooey or one maybe by concentrating
the starchy pasta water down even more and then you know being a little bit more careful when you have the cheese and so so that's what my my three ingredient one is basically you cook pasta in a pot with water just enough to cover it and you cook that water down until it basically
all evaporates and so all of the pasta water concentrates on all those the starch that washes off the pasta stays in the pot and that's what sort of a forms what's essentially you know like a fat free rou in the bottom of your pot that you can then stir evaporated milk
and cheese into so I made your quick essential stovetop mac and cheese I made it it was delicious um I want to read the first comment on that piece on smittenkitchen.com we're coming is that can't you the comment is from stalley tea who said on February 27th 2018 my kids vastly
prefer Annie's mac and cheese and craft to any homemade version that I make which is truly ironic given how much I cook for my daughter's fourth birthday we tried the serious eats version of mac and cheese that is supposed to taste like craft and it was a big fail nevertheless
I'll definitely try this one is this the 14 ingredient one or the three ingredient one she made that comment 2018 she was probably talking about my like multi ingredient mac and cheese recipe which contains eggs and cornstarch and a bunch of other stuff wow but I love that she
compared mine to yours immediately right off the bat well I made your three ingredient mac and cheese and let's talk more about that after the break all right welcome back to the recipe with debing Kenji Kenji I made your very famous three ingredient macaroni and cheese recipe and I think
there it's it's a really unique recipe I don't think there's any others like it or nothing else that I saw and I want to talk about why and I have a few questions for you so the main difference is that the existing recipes that are out there have you cook the pasta directly in milk
and then stir season at the end and I actually tested this when I was working on my recipe and I took that step out because of foolproofing because I found if you weren't careful the milk would scorch so your three ingredient mac and cheese is part of a can of evaporated milk
use some grated mild or medium cheddar cheese or any good melting cheese you say you can use fontina, greaier, jack and then you've got uncooked pasta macaroni and what I find so interesting about this because this is a one pot recipe like you're not cooking the pasta
separately and then making a sauce it's all right in there which is really a dream of for speed almost every time I make a dish no matter how fond over it is on the internet how many times it's gone viral around the world when the pasta is cooked in the sauce something's always missing for
me there's always like an edge missing in the pasta or I feel like it's a little gummy if it's cooked directly in the sauce I mean but that didn't happen here and I want to know how you pulled off this magic so we start with you've got your dried pasta you just cover it with water and then you
bring it up to a boil and so it does start by cooking in water and that might be why the texture doesn't get that weird sort of soft edge guminess you basically add the sauce at the right time to not ruin the texture of the pasta which is incredibly clever so you knew this because you said you
had tried to make mac and cheese recipes where you cook it in the milk and what it happened well what happens is that the dangers that the milk scalds the pasta does get a little bit more of that sort of guminess not not too much because you know that that guminess comes because most
sauces like if you're trying to cook your pasta in a tomato sauce for instance the sauce is acidic right and starches like they don't they don't soften the same way in acidic environments and so yeah your pasta ends up taking longer to cook and also getting a little bit gummy or then it
does if you cook it in just plain water milk is generally not you know not particular acidic unless it's very old milk you don't really have that texture problem as much but the main reason I switch from milk to water is because the milk would scorch if you're not careful yeah you have to stir
it gets to it yeah it evaporates and we don't really have that issue here but I was so expecting it so talk to me about the evaporated milk because I feel like in a million years I would have never thought to use evaporated milk and I also don't know how many people keep it around like is evaporated
milk just milk that's been like cooked down maybe reduced by half or is there more to it reduced by more than half but yeah ostensibly it's just been cooked down and reduced although although I think realistically they take all the constituent parts of milk and then and then blend it back
into some kind of you know franken milk I think that's how they maybe old the old fashioned way would be to actually boil it down but now I think it's like they take milk protein and milk fat and mix it to the exact right ratio and then stick it in a can it's really I mean it's a really
interesting product I must have come on the market as a way to you know stabilize milk production you know have an inexpensive way that you could always have milk in the house if you and if you have you gone to a store because our milk doesn't last long and so is that how you just you just knew
that it was going to work here so the way the reason evaporated milk works so well is because so there's milk proteins in there that help them also buy the cheese does when we and when we say emulsion we're talking about like making sure that the fat in the cheese doesn't separate out from
the liquid you know and then making sure that the proteins in the cheese don't I'll just clump together and turn it to like a stringy kind of mess that can happen the higher the concentration of milk protein you have in there the easier it is to form that emulsion just using a can of evaporated
milk I find is a more foolproof more reliable way to do that than to actually just try and boil the milk down yourself if you didn't have it and you boiled the milk down the way it work or it just it's yeah yeah you just have to be a lot more careful and make sure that the milk doesn't
scald but absolutely you can use the same recipe and just swap water out at the beginning for milk and leave the evaporated milk out of the recipe so basically cover the pasta with enough milk that you can boil it and then reduce that milk down until it's very concentrated and the pasta
is fully cooked and then you stir and cheese but again scientifically it works to make this cheese sauce but also because you're not cooking the whole thing and milk you're cooking it in water for the first half you end up having you don't lose any of the creaminess because you're using like
double concentrate milk so you feel like it tastes like it was cooked in milk but without actually having the issues that come with it yes and it's and it's more reliable so after you cook the pasta most of the way in the water and most of the water is gone and then you add the evaporated milk
and then you add your grated cheese and I have to tell you I trust you Kenji but I was like there's no way this is gonna work there's no way this is gonna work it's going to curdle like you can't cook cheese it doesn't work like it just splits you know what is cheese it's like milk solids
and fat I mean and that's what and they just it splits that's how you get those kind of clumpy bits and greasy bits and you like think something's gone wrong but in general if you cook cheese this is what's gonna happen you can make it like delicious and aesthetic by making like fricot cheese
crisp but in general it's not gonna so I'm adding this cheese to this mixture and I'm cooking it because for me I'm gonna add when I usually add cheese to a recipe I'm gonna then take it off the stove or have it off the stove already because I don't want it to split but you let us keep cooking
it and I'm like this is gonna be a disaster and it wasn't it was so good so it's all because of this evaporated bill it's partly that it's also the you know the starchiness of the pasta water so when you're when you're cooking pasta there's starch from the pasta that leaches off into the water
when you toss pasta with with sauce at the end when you're about to serve it you always want to add like a splash of the reserved pasta water back into it to help it emulsify it's the starch in there that's that's helping it emulsify you know helps it thicken up a little bit when you're cooking the
pasta down in water and you're not draining it at the end you know you're just cooking the water down until it evaporates none of the starch leaves and so you have that really sort of hyper-concentrated pasta water in the bottom of the pot so it's almost like it's almost like making a besamel but without you know without the extra fat and without the extra step and you end up with a very thick creamy like really rich stove top mac and cheese like it's really decadent yeah like a gooey a gooey
stove top mac and cheese this should be I mean I I like to think if you do it right it ends up kind of kind of glossy you know definitely glossy and there's definitely like it looks iconic like I would take a picture of it with my phone it'll look like it came out of like a fancy restaurant or
a food ad because it's it has that opacity it has the orange it has the thickness like you can barely see the definition of the pasta you know texture which is like a goal yeah it's really incredible so it was a big hit so I've made it a bunch of her time I tend to play around I tend to use more of
a white cheddar and then I started working in some parmesan because that's just my preferred sharpness and I sometimes take down the amount of cheese just a little bit but I do have fun playing it it's a really forgiving recipe and it's incredibly clever and again it's one pot I mean mine's
one pot too but you're gonna have one person oh yeah but you have to take the pasta out of the pot to make the sauce that's true people get annoyed when you say one pot and and it's like oh but you also have to drain it yeah it's like yes so you mean one pot plus one call and dirt well that's
the whole thing you can have two pots and make things faster or you can have one pot make things slower you just have to choose your culinary priority sometimes but I have a small quibble with your recipe I like to hear quibbles yeah Kenji why are you doing this to me personally why are you making
me use six ounces of dry pasta and I have a scale I have multiple scales it's not that but I personally like I just have this thing this kind of like twitchy thing where I need things to either match the package size or half the package size I love a recipe with four tablespoons of butter or
eight eight ounces of pasta or 16 although I do break that own rule for mine because mine's a single serving so it's four ounces so the six ounces it's not half and it's not quarter you're right and I have a kitchen scale it's not an issue but I just could you I just warmly you're
among friends could you tell me why you did this to me all right couple things so first of all if you're using a scale to weigh your pasta you're being way fussy or than I than I ever am welcome time fussy no it's because it matches the evaporated milk container sizes those come in six ounces or
12 ounces it's because I didn't want people to end up with like a little bit of some random amount of pasta leftover have a better idea of what to do with that than some random amount of evaporated milk leftover but you know I should have really just made it six ounces of evaporated
milk and eight ounces of pasta and the recipe still works fine I was actually going to say the whole can of milk a whole box of pasta oh yeah if you do a 12 into 16 ounce sure yeah so speaking of ratios of cheese to pasta so one main way in which our recipe is different is that mine has
an equal ratio of cheese to pasta like a pound of cheese for pound of pasta yours is more it's like three to one yours has four ounces of pasta this is for single serving four ounces of pasta and one ounce of Parmesan cheese so you use a much sort of stronger flavored cheese but a lot less of
it so your recipe I made it as well it's almost to me the flavors are more like a catchoi pepe right because it's black pepper and Parmesan but instead unlike a catchoi pepe it starts with a new special so you're essentially making a like a real cheese saw like a French style like a mornet sauce
right I love this flavor of of this special of this sauce because I feel like you get that kind of richness from the dairy you get the little bit of butter in there and because I'm using such a sharp cheese I just find that you don't need as much I mean obviously you can go a little bit over
but I always felt like I got the right cheese intensity because it's a very aged cheese with like a very good bite to it I also love the idea of building it on Parmesan first and foremost or pecorino because I feel like people often have these at home often even pre-graded you can add a
little garlic you can add more butter I also very often use I usually split it between a sharp white cheddar and Parmesan too for more of a classic flavor but yeah for me this was exactly what I wanted just like a thickened buttery sauce with a good cheesy sharp impact for me it was
just I wanted to create a simple impactful cheese sauce I wanted it to be really easy and I kind of even though you could probably breath on this without a recipe I really like getting the recipe exactly right and then you can just scale it up to the amount you want to make right which works
I think better with yours because yours you're building the sauce separately whereas mine kind of relies on that evaporation effect and it's it's a little harder to scale tell me about Bessamel sauce is in general and why why you chose a Bessamel for for this particular version a
Bessamel is one of the mother sauces of French cuisine it's basically a brew you know butter and flour mixture which you cook together and then you add milk and often you often see versions with like a little nutmeg and but it's one of these classic sauces that's foundational I think
it becomes a more nay sauce when you add cheese to it but I did not get trained in cooking in France I'm gonna just nod and be like that sounds right now I think it's a more nay sauce when you add cheese but to me that I always felt like that was the flavor behind the box cheese sauce like when
you're adding butter to this powder butter and milk and the powder has some thickener in it I felt like that was what you were doing and I felt like that was the best way to get it and as I said when they started using those deluxe cheese packets I felt like I was missing that buttery flavor
like it didn't taste I didn't get the butter I'm in it for the butter I'm in it for the butter right right because I think those deluxe ones in fact I'm pretty sure the powder also has it but those rely on sodium citrate which is like an emulsifying salt it's the salt that has the chemical
formula that spells nacho you know it's like so yeah it's like I can't remember what the stuff I would only learn from you that's amazing it's like NNANANA6C5H307 or something like that I can't remember the exact numbers but it but it spells nacho it's used by companies as partly to
get that sort of glossy gooey texture but also as a cost saving measure because you can make nacho cheese sauce that's like you know 90% water as opposed to you know it'll be a mixture of water and oil that's emulsified as opposed to actual you know dairy which is more expensive than just
vegetable oil and water I think that's part of what why you're missing that buttery flavor because there's probably literally less dairy in there and for me I really wanted to taste like better than box while having utter respect for box and feeling like it's a perfect product yeah using good cheese
good butter you can really get so much more flavor out of it but even if you're just using grocery store butter and like pre-graded parmesan I guarantee you're going to find it to have a more like nuanced flavor yes so I found yours to taste like what a lesser blogger would have
described as adult mac and cheese but you to your credit did not use the word adult in there at all which there's no curtains in this room right now but you know it's still obviously very very simple but there's a little bit more technique involved in it because you got to you got to make your
your beshamel sauce and you got to make sure your cheese doesn't curdle when you add it in there I think the perfect hybrid of our recipes not that anyone asks is I think that we use the pasta cooking method of yours we use the evaporated milk for me like I've got to have like a
knob of butter in there and then I use white cheddar and parmesan combo mostly cheddar yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I could get a little bit of that butteriness but the technique for yours is just so cool that you get to do away with if it's someone's trying to come up with a
mass recipe but I think what really people need to do is they need to make both of ours one thing I do want to talk about is like cheese choices you know like for example like Debs recipe I think works better with sharper cheeses like so if you try and use like a parmesan or like a super
extra sharp cheddar in my recipe it'll come out grainy because there's not like enough emulsifying help in there for mine you can really add a little more cheese and you could add a little more sauce you could use less pasta more sauce you can play around and it's pretty forgiving of adjustments
but can you could I do your because I've definitely done yours where I've added a little bit of parmesan and some white cheddar but I probably can't use all that in it no so yeah so my recipe the sort of the emulsifying power in there is not extremely great and so so you wouldn't want
to do something like a very extra sharp cheddar you know somewhere like a pure parmesan something you know a harder cheese generally like the the more age to cheese and the harder and the crumbly or it is the more flavor it's going to have but also the more difficult it's going to be to
incorporate it into a sort of smooth sauce and so my recipe you really want to stick with things like a milder cheddar maybe a medium cheddar or an American cheese or like a fontina whereas Debs your recipe you know you use a bachamel and so you can get away with using like a really much more
flavorful cheese so I feel like if you're a home cook and you're looking at these two recipes and you're thinking which one do I want I think mine is sort of the milder gooey or one whereas yours is the one where you can really pick whatever cheese you want and if you really want to use that
high end like you know that seven-year-old cheddar cheese that turns into a shard when you poke at it like they'll still work in yours homemade macaroni and cheese makes a hit and it's simple with craft macaroni and cheese dinner only a nickel serving too you get tender macaroni a new improved
craft graded that makes craft dinner golden with rich cheddar flavor but I was digging into research I did not know that craft macaroni cheese was originally called craft dinner so it's just dinner like the utter confidence of being like this is your whole dinner can you do you think mac and
cheese by itself is dinner I think on the days that I that I resort to pulling out a box of craft mac and cheese from the pantry it is absolutely dinner I can't remember lots of I made mac and cheese where I didn't add something to it for us the default is frozen peas is my daughter loves
frozen peas and I love frozen peas and usually it'll be either ham or maybe some like leftover chicken or something like that but frozen peas and definitely broccoli are like very very common mac and cheese dishes for us I put it yeah directly into the mac and cheese my kids would call
the cops on me the one time I put broccoli in the mac and cheese and I was like look at me I'm like in my kids like broccoli and they like mac and cheese and I was like I really thought I was on to something and they would not touch it like they were so betrayed by this mac and cheese now did
you always feel that mac and cheese required peas or broccoli or something else in it did it dolthood ruin the purity of mac and cheese for us or is it better with other stuff in it because I'm pretty sure as a kid or even in college I was never like oh my god there isn't a green vegetable
in this meal so it's not correct yet and no I mean the peas we do just because we like peas I'd be fine without it it's not like a health reason I don't follow like a you got to have every food group you know in every single meal I'm like look at me imagining that you couldn't possibly
put peas and mac and cheese for any other reason then you thought it was virtuous I'm like sorry but my biases are showing you know I love you know before I put the pasta and the water all usually throw in some broccoli florets or something like that or green beans something to cook
scoop it out do the pasta and then I go from there so I am cooking two parts of the meal in one pot well I can tell you know from the early days of series these this must have been Syracah 2010 or so but we did one with mac and cheese where it was like I don't know 17 ways to
amp your mac or something internet speak from the from the mid 2000s that was one of the most popular articles and it was all just like things you can add to your macaroni and cheese and there was like an internet famous video of some like drunk very entitled looking college kid getting
mad at a cafeteria worker because they were out of bacon and jalapeno mac and cheese and we definitely put that bacon and pickled jalapeno in there which are good additions to mac and cheese pickled jalapenos in particular go really well I think it would be really good I think you just
can't cook the pickle well that's one of the things about stove top mac and cheese is you want most of your additions to be things that you can just stir in at the end yeah so Kenji what do you do when you have left errors for mac and cheese I tend to just microwave it and hope for the best but
usually the texture is not as good as the first day right yeah so the the issue with macaroni and cheese in fact it's like the same issue you get with when you add noodles to chicken noodle soup and you let us sit in the fridge every night you know it's that the pasta just continues to it drinks
up all your hard work exactly so the same thing happens in mac and cheese it's like the pasta just continues to absorb liquid water and so the ratio of like water to fat to protein gets all thrown off which is why it ends up kind of sometimes curdling and sometimes a little chunky but but really all you got to do is just add more water to it you know some kind of liquid to it I usually either add a splash of milk to loosen it back up or a splash of water works okay also a splash of heavy cream
I actually just heated up and I kind of like the different texture I wouldn't want it on the first day but I feel like I'm okay with it having a little more of a I don't know like a low-feet texture yeah I mean you can also kind of have fun with it but something my mom used to do my mom used to
always take left a risk of getting a and she would fry it in a pan with some butter just a little bit and then try not to marmage on it and it was so good it was so good so I don't mind it when it gets some crunchy edges to it so anytime I post I post like a recipe or an article or whatever
about how to do something leftover like I guarantee you like one of the first five comments on there is going to be leftover mac and cheese what is that hilarious leftover whatever what is that that's just like generic internet recipe comment it doesn't matter how small the portion of
somebody always ask me many people always ask me if they can freeze something yes which I totally understand what it's a giant ziti bit I'm like this is a single serving mac and cheese can you freeze it maybe so going back to your mom's fried spaghetti if you have like mac and cheese leftover
do you ever just like slice it and fry it and skill it with like butter or oil I have definitely done it and it's really good like it's messy but it's good and then the other question is have you ever stuck it in a waffle iron I have not waffled it have you waffled mac and cheese yeah yeah yeah
but like that's the baked kind you would want a waffle you know you can waffle stove top mac and cheese at least day old stove top mac and cheese okay you cut a slice out that's like the thickness of like a slice of thick bread you know okay and then you stick that in the waffle iron I think we
figured it out we're gonna have done every episode with a will it waffle okay will it waffle will tortilla yeah yeah can you fry it in a pan with butter those are the three questions I want to know about every food all right well that was the first episode of the recipe thank you for joining us
the recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Prolman and Jake Hange Lopez alt our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions Edwin Achoa is the project manager the executive producer for radio topia is Audrey Mardovic and Yuri Lassardo is the director of
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