White dude here. Growing up, my mom always baked it like the left one. She would drop pieces of bread on top so it would toast up. It’s still the best mac and cheese I’ve had to this day and now I need to make it. RIP mom.
Yes and my Mom would put fried breadcrumbs on top, I think there are these seasoned breadcrumbs from a box and you just fry em up. I really should look into it.
My mom never cooked and my dad didn't either. When I was growing up my oldest sister made Kraft from a box a lot, too bad it sucks nowadays. Kraft use to be so good.
I make it my goal in life to defy the white people can't cook stereotype. My wife's family is the epitome of this, so I'm the designated chef for a lot of our family dinners. My Mac n Cheese is stupid good though.
Freshly grated cheeses (sharp cheddar, gruyere/fontina, smoked gouda, parmigiano reggiano) and a bit of American for that sodium citrate emulsifying power, melted into a piping hot beschemel with Dijon, mustard powder, paprika, a pinch of thyme, and a hit of cayenne. Mix in some drained elbow or penne pasta, cooked to just al dente in well salted water, in a baking dish. Depending on my mood/desire for texture, either top with reserved cheese or some seasoned, buttered, well-crushed Ritz crackers. Bake until browned nicely.
Been making Mac like this for a few years and it is regularly the favorite of the meal. Gotta use a variety of cheeses that give you strong cheesy flavor, creaminess, smokiness and nuttiness. The mustard is also important to cut the richness of the cheese.
There's a common stereotype that white Americans don't use seasoning or cook from scratch. And that's not exactly unfounded. I've known plenty that cook this way.
If there's a race war, I'mma be on the side with the seasoning. Gumbo, bbq, jerk chicken, greens... I'll leave you guys the tuna casseroles and cobb salad.
Damn. I'm diabetic and on a low carb diet. I've been wanting to try and make a cauliflower version of Mac and cheese and your comment makes me want to try it even more.
You'd need to replace the bechemel to eliminate the carbs in the flour. You can make a similar sauce with butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, chicken broth, and an egg yolk. It will taste a bit cheesier than typical beschemel, but that is hardly problem for mac n cheese. And the wheat pasta needs to be changed out, obviously. You could always get low carb pasta, or just replace the mac entirely. The sauce would go great on some steamed/roasted veggies too. Like broccoli or cauliflower, green beans, mushrooms, etc.
For the recipe I use, it calls for equal parts, 4 tbsp (1/4 cup), butter and flour and 2.5 cups milk. Which is 23-24 gram of carbs from the flour and 28-30 grams from the milk.
It is generally true, due to a bunch of factors. Personally, I've observed 2 factors:
a lot of culinary tradition was lost by the boomers and their parents due to the advent of mass-produced, packaged food and the Great Depression. A lot of very basic, holistic techniques like making broth, rendering fat, became less common as magazine recipes, refrigeration, and boxed food encouraged discrete "buy x y z for recipe A" instead of having an assortment of preserved veggies/meats, broth, lard from previous days etc, to work with and learn from. I was genuinely confused to find my dad had to teach himself a lot of it in his 20s and my mom never learned.
Economic/cultural history. A lot of families didn't see making food better as worth sparing any effort or time on. My grandma's boiled veggies and potatoes, no seasoning, and meat fried in a pan, no sesoning, eaten and cleaned up as quickly as possible come to mind.
It depends on the location, honestly. A lot of country grannies can cook, because they depended on what they could provide for themselves, milk, eggs, butter, cheese, canning, freezing, smoking. A lot of sub/urbans couldn't do that and lost the art.
Can confirm 1, dad grew up on TV dinners and canned food; and somehow Grandma thought it was ok to add ketchup to make spaghetti sauce. That second one might be 2, too, actually.
Man, it's gotta have 3 or more large eggs, a pound of block or hoop (not Velveeta) cheese, grated + some to go on top, and real butter. If it's not golden brown with crispy edges, it's not done. Even better if it has shrimp, crab, or lobster in it.
Same. I might be biased because my mom would get the frozen mac&cheese dinner and bake them, and the macaroni was always over done and grossly mushy. The cheese also tasted weirdly grainy.
Every single time someone tells me they put their heart and soul into something like the left one full of ingredients that sound magic,I take a bite and it's hella mid.
Dickeys BBQ makes the best version of the one on the right of any chain I've been to. Dip waffle fries in it for majesty.
You can absolutely make baked mac like the left and have it be amazing, but I'm with you that most people don't make "proper home made" mac and cheese nearly as well as they think they do, even if the top looks ll delicious like in the pic. Coincidentally, the best mac and cheese I ever made looked like the right, but that was only because people were getting impatient so I decided to skip the baking part.
(if you slightly undercook this you could still bake, just add breadcrumbs, sprinkles of some hard cheese, and herbs on top of it and back for about 10 minutes on 180c/350f)
It really depends on the recipe. The most basic is just regular mac and cheese with extra cheese on top and broil to color on top. Don't want to overdo it.
Some like having extras for toppings aside from cheese such as crackers, cheez-its, bread crumbs, or even hot cheetos.
Often times the mac and cheese mixture is fortified to enhance creaminess or help prevent breaking the sauce from the heat. This can be in the form of additional cheese folded in (grated cheeses or cream cheese chunks folded in, or including some sodium citrate like american cheese, velveeta, or granules to smooth out the cheese. Some recipes even call for addition of eggs before baking. There is a risk of over baking which can lead to noodles soaking up too much sauce which can lose the saucy texture and become dry, or end up breaking the sauce and end with an oily mess.
After that, bake it in a casserole dish/dutch oven at like 400°F for ~20m (maybe more). Keep an eye on it, bake it until it is nice and brown on top. My spouse and I also do 8oz of each cheese instead of the asymmetric amounts. Put panko breadcrumbs and parm on top before baking it to get a nice crunch.
I don't know if this translates to mac n cheese but if you put things like frozen pizza in a convection oven/air fryer it comes out as if it was from a pizzeria.
The right one still looks plenty creamy. You could easily just bake it for a bit with some extra cheese and maybe some cracker crumbs on top, and it'd be just as good as the left.
Dumb question but what’s the difference? As someone who grew up on the orange stuff from a box, and learned to make the one on the right in recent years, what am I looking for? Is the left just baked? I’ve done that. Is it a topping or spice that encourages browning?
If you're making the one on the right using flour + butter-> brown -> Milk -> cheese then you're mostly there. You just slightly undercook the noodles before mixing in the cheese sauce and cover with shredded cheese and bake until the top browns. Some people will add panko/breadcrumbs for a bit of crunch.
I would absolutely make it this way with a roux to bake it. If I'm not baking it though you can for sure one pan it. Drain mostly cooked noodles, milk, butter, Velveeta, cream cheese, and a little bit of any other hard orange cheese you might have. Principally, this is I believe the main application for Velveeta besides queso and it's the star of Mac and cheese on the stovetop.
Velveeta is a lot safer in these kinds of recipes because it's less likely to clump if your roux/milk/cheese ratio is off.
However, you can just use the same cheat that Velveeta uses, a culinary emulsifier, to get the same results while also using high quality cheese. Traditionally the roux acts as an emulsifier but it's easy to have too much fats for the amount of roux that you've made so you get the clumping/grainy texture. Using sodium citrate you can just mix the cheese and milk directly without needing to make the roux. It's very convenient to just heat milk and put cheese in it without fussing with the roux.
Here's a recipe if you want to try it (spoiler: it's basically milk, cheese, sodium citrate):
The white people in my family certainly don't. They're all too busy trying bullshit recipes that use ingredients in unconventional ways which turn out terrible because if they weren't terrible those recipes would already be well known, or not knowing how to cook anything that doesn't come out of a box/freezer bag.
Okay well next time before generalizing your family as the entirety of white people, maybe stop to consider whether you're including yourself in that before posting it?
It is a generalization based off the very accurate stereotype that a fuckload of white people can't cook for shit. Myself included for a very long time until I learned. Get over yourself.
White dude here. Growing up, my mom always baked it like the left one. She would drop pieces of bread on top so it would toast up. It’s still the best mac and cheese I’ve had to this day and now I need to make it. RIP mom.
Instead of bread try a layer of grated cheese, and put it under an overhead grill.
Oh hell yeah.
Mixture of grated cheese and panko, best of both 🤌
Yes and my Mom would put fried breadcrumbs on top, I think there are these seasoned breadcrumbs from a box and you just fry em up. I really should look into it.
My mom never cooked and my dad didn't either. When I was growing up my oldest sister made Kraft from a box a lot, too bad it sucks nowadays. Kraft use to be so good.
The left one for sure. If it ain't baked, hit the breaks.
It’s my personal pet peeve when people right breaks when they mean brakes.
I actually didn't know this homophone. Thank you for teaching me something today. I was beginning to think today was a waste but now I am fulfilled.
I’m always here to satisfy you.
Username checks out
Your spelling is actually really good for an orc.
Oh, the irony.
What’s the write word there then?
Maybe look it up in a dictionary if you don't no.
Thanks four that I’ll look now.
This is such a hole sum exchange.
Write? Eye a door Lemmy.
*their
It's just a missteak, could happen too any one
Them's the brakes
Same. Or who's and whose
Yeah but give them a brake, would ya?
I make it my goal in life to defy the white people can't cook stereotype. My wife's family is the epitome of this, so I'm the designated chef for a lot of our family dinners. My Mac n Cheese is stupid good though.
Freshly grated cheeses (sharp cheddar, gruyere/fontina, smoked gouda, parmigiano reggiano) and a bit of American for that sodium citrate emulsifying power, melted into a piping hot beschemel with Dijon, mustard powder, paprika, a pinch of thyme, and a hit of cayenne. Mix in some drained elbow or penne pasta, cooked to just al dente in well salted water, in a baking dish. Depending on my mood/desire for texture, either top with reserved cheese or some seasoned, buttered, well-crushed Ritz crackers. Bake until browned nicely.
Been making Mac like this for a few years and it is regularly the favorite of the meal. Gotta use a variety of cheeses that give you strong cheesy flavor, creaminess, smokiness and nuttiness. The mustard is also important to cut the richness of the cheese.
Who said that white people can't cook?
French and italian food is generally regarded as good.
The stereotype is usually that the British can't cook.
There's a common stereotype that white Americans don't use seasoning or cook from scratch. And that's not exactly unfounded. I've known plenty that cook this way.
The most delicious way to be a race traitor o7
If there's a race war, I'mma be on the side with the seasoning. Gumbo, bbq, jerk chicken, greens... I'll leave you guys the tuna casseroles and cobb salad.
God damn. You win potluck.
Am I invited to the proverbial cookout?
Damn. I'm diabetic and on a low carb diet. I've been wanting to try and make a cauliflower version of Mac and cheese and your comment makes me want to try it even more.
I miss carbs 😭
You'd need to replace the bechemel to eliminate the carbs in the flour. You can make a similar sauce with butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, chicken broth, and an egg yolk. It will taste a bit cheesier than typical beschemel, but that is hardly problem for mac n cheese. And the wheat pasta needs to be changed out, obviously. You could always get low carb pasta, or just replace the mac entirely. The sauce would go great on some steamed/roasted veggies too. Like broccoli or cauliflower, green beans, mushrooms, etc.
Thanks for the tips. How much flour is in there? Small amounts of carbs is ok, it's unavoidable, really. I've had some decent low-carb pastas.
For the recipe I use, it calls for equal parts, 4 tbsp (1/4 cup), butter and flour and 2.5 cups milk. Which is 23-24 gram of carbs from the flour and 28-30 grams from the milk.
Huh?
White people can't cook is the joke.
Honestly, seeing what some people call seasoning, they have a point.
It is generally true, due to a bunch of factors. Personally, I've observed 2 factors:
a lot of culinary tradition was lost by the boomers and their parents due to the advent of mass-produced, packaged food and the Great Depression. A lot of very basic, holistic techniques like making broth, rendering fat, became less common as magazine recipes, refrigeration, and boxed food encouraged discrete "buy x y z for recipe A" instead of having an assortment of preserved veggies/meats, broth, lard from previous days etc, to work with and learn from. I was genuinely confused to find my dad had to teach himself a lot of it in his 20s and my mom never learned.
Economic/cultural history. A lot of families didn't see making food better as worth sparing any effort or time on. My grandma's boiled veggies and potatoes, no seasoning, and meat fried in a pan, no sesoning, eaten and cleaned up as quickly as possible come to mind.
It depends on the location, honestly. A lot of country grannies can cook, because they depended on what they could provide for themselves, milk, eggs, butter, cheese, canning, freezing, smoking. A lot of sub/urbans couldn't do that and lost the art.
Can confirm 1, dad grew up on TV dinners and canned food; and somehow Grandma thought it was ok to add ketchup to make spaghetti sauce. That second one might be 2, too, actually.
Also, and in addition.
Man, it's gotta have 3 or more large eggs, a pound of block or hoop (not Velveeta) cheese, grated + some to go on top, and real butter. If it's not golden brown with crispy edges, it's not done. Even better if it has shrimp, crab, or lobster in it.
Like macaroni pie, I love breadcrumbs on top and just an ungodly amount of mature cheddar… literally by weight more than the pasta, and some milk!
Seasoning = salt.
Almost every aspect of this video is so annoying but I refer to it all the time
That was annoying but correct
dear god the comment section ☢️
Non YT version, but it's still tiktok 🤮
https://inv.nadeko.net/mCzzlGcpll0
American white people.
It's a running joke that the British refuse to season their food, this isn't just an American thing.
So french, Italian, Spanish, German, Lithuanian, and every other country I refuse to list (sorry if so left your out) don't count?
I admit we Finns and other scandinavian people don't really season our traditional foods, so we just say we like "natural" or "pure" flavors
I love how hard you're trying to be offended here.
Compared to the British, those are amazing
Compared to the Creoles, those are pretty bland too
Please remove Germany from your list, they make the rest of us look bad.
Until you have experienced a Mettigel you don't get to shittalk German Küche. Bonus points for Toast Hawaii.
Ignorant bigotry does indeed exist in many places.
These jokes usually accompany photos of actual British food. I'm a white person of British descent, to be clear.
https://macattackcle.com/blogs/mac-chat/the-black-history-of-mac-and-cheese
Yeah, because Italian "noodles" weren't born in China. That is a myth that has long since been busted.
Mac and Cheese originated in medieval England anyway.
I don't know why I think this way, but the left image looks too hot to eat while the right image looks too cold for it to taste good.
I fuck with both macs. I will say though, I'm noticing there are no (apparent / obvious) spices/herbs.
Add some raisins, it will be fine.
am i the only person who finds them both appetizing
Nope. Two different styles of making the same food
Just so everyone here knows, these pictures do not need to be mutually exclusive. You can do both.
...i don't like mac and cheese bakes. I'm so sorry.
Same. I might be biased because my mom would get the frozen mac&cheese dinner and bake them, and the macaroni was always over done and grossly mushy. The cheese also tasted weirdly grainy.
"I ate a bad version of a dish, so I know I don't like that dish" is how that sounds
That's exactly how it is. If the first 10 times you have baked macaroni and cheese it's awful, you're not going to want to try it again.
I also don't like baked apples because I was violently ill after eating apple crumble once. Same with grape Smirnoff Ice.
Baked Mac and cheese is the only Mac and cheese. I miss my mom's so fucking much it's crazy. I can make it, but nobody made it like her.
Ugh now I want macaroni and cheese
Every single time someone tells me they put their heart and soul into something like the left one full of ingredients that sound magic,I take a bite and it's hella mid.
Dickeys BBQ makes the best version of the one on the right of any chain I've been to. Dip waffle fries in it for majesty.
You can absolutely make baked mac like the left and have it be amazing, but I'm with you that most people don't make "proper home made" mac and cheese nearly as well as they think they do, even if the top looks ll delicious like in the pic. Coincidentally, the best mac and cheese I ever made looked like the right, but that was only because people were getting impatient so I decided to skip the baking part.
For the record I like no1 the best.
But what if I told you that you could make no2 in less than ten minutes with only three ingredients?
https://www.seriouseats.com/ingredient-stovetop-mac-and-cheese-recipe
(if you slightly undercook this you could still bake, just add breadcrumbs, sprinkles of some hard cheese, and herbs on top of it and back for about 10 minutes on 180c/350f)
Not sure what a Juneteenth is, but everything is better when gratinated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth
Celebration of the "end of slavery". Quoted because the 14th amendment still allows enslavement for criminals.
I'd rather have macaroni salad. Mac and cheese is too formal for a picnic
What the uppity hell is formal about Mac and cheese?
Mac and cheese requires utensils, while good macaroni salad is drinkable
wtf america explain
Gringos come out with the wildest shit sometimes huh
...no?
You only need utensils for mac and cheese when it's hot, though.
That's most food.
So the moral here is get baked on June 19th?
How do I make the left one?
It really depends on the recipe. The most basic is just regular mac and cheese with extra cheese on top and broil to color on top. Don't want to overdo it.
Some like having extras for toppings aside from cheese such as crackers, cheez-its, bread crumbs, or even hot cheetos.
Often times the mac and cheese mixture is fortified to enhance creaminess or help prevent breaking the sauce from the heat. This can be in the form of additional cheese folded in (grated cheeses or cream cheese chunks folded in, or including some sodium citrate like american cheese, velveeta, or granules to smooth out the cheese. Some recipes even call for addition of eggs before baking. There is a risk of over baking which can lead to noodles soaking up too much sauce which can lose the saucy texture and become dry, or end up breaking the sauce and end with an oily mess.
It starts with six pounds of pig tails and two pounds of pork belly.
Bake it in the oven
Edit: also use real cheese, not Velveeta or something. Use a nice cheddar.
This is a very good recipe https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/stovetop-mac-and-cheese
After that, bake it in a casserole dish/dutch oven at like 400°F for ~20m (maybe more). Keep an eye on it, bake it until it is nice and brown on top. My spouse and I also do 8oz of each cheese instead of the asymmetric amounts. Put panko breadcrumbs and parm on top before baking it to get a nice crunch.
Disregard healthy add a good cheddar or similar cheese grill for about 5-7 mins.
Do Brits say grill instead of broil?
Guess so bit of the oven that's open with the element on top. Good for making cheese toasties
Thats what broiling is? I assumed it was a method of boiling i was too uncheffy to understand. Also too lazy to look up.
Even now.
I don't know if this translates to mac n cheese but if you put things like frozen pizza in a convection oven/air fryer it comes out as if it was from a pizzeria.
The right one still looks plenty creamy. You could easily just bake it for a bit with some extra cheese and maybe some cracker crumbs on top, and it'd be just as good as the left.
You need to get it with chicken or pulled pork in it. Mmmmmm
Joke's on you, I prefer cheese soup with noodles.
Dumb question but what’s the difference? As someone who grew up on the orange stuff from a box, and learned to make the one on the right in recent years, what am I looking for? Is the left just baked? I’ve done that. Is it a topping or spice that encourages browning?
Everyone shed a tear for this poor individual.
If you're making the one on the right using flour + butter-> brown -> Milk -> cheese then you're mostly there. You just slightly undercook the noodles before mixing in the cheese sauce and cover with shredded cheese and bake until the top browns. Some people will add panko/breadcrumbs for a bit of crunch.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try
I would absolutely make it this way with a roux to bake it. If I'm not baking it though you can for sure one pan it. Drain mostly cooked noodles, milk, butter, Velveeta, cream cheese, and a little bit of any other hard orange cheese you might have. Principally, this is I believe the main application for Velveeta besides queso and it's the star of Mac and cheese on the stovetop.
Velveeta is a lot safer in these kinds of recipes because it's less likely to clump if your roux/milk/cheese ratio is off.
However, you can just use the same cheat that Velveeta uses, a culinary emulsifier, to get the same results while also using high quality cheese. Traditionally the roux acts as an emulsifier but it's easy to have too much fats for the amount of roux that you've made so you get the clumping/grainy texture. Using sodium citrate you can just mix the cheese and milk directly without needing to make the roux. It's very convenient to just heat milk and put cheese in it without fussing with the roux.
Here's a recipe if you want to try it (spoiler: it's basically milk, cheese, sodium citrate):
https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/silky-smooth-macaroni-and-cheese/
If I were there I'd invite you to the next cookout. The sleeper must awaken.
The one on the right is still good, and better for mixing with other stuff on the plate, like mashed potatoes and gravy.
People dont put veggies in mac n cheese? Maybe im just coping hard.
Dunno if I'm "people" but adding broccoli or cauliflower slaps.
I like mushroom, peas, carrot, corn and beans, onion also bacon
One of these is macaroni cheese and the other is not
I love food, and cooking. But I will always take a big ol' scoop of #2.
Either way, I prefer Cavatappi over elbow mac if I had a choice in the matter. It holds on to the cheese soooooo well.
Haha racism funny 😆
Shut up, cracker.
Guess again.
The coconut nut is a giant nut If you eat too much, you'll get very fat Now, the coconut nut is a big, big nut But this delicious nut is not a nut
It's the coco fruit (It's the coco fruit) Of the coco tree (Of the coco tree) From the coco palm family!
Ayayayayai
Is the joke that white people don't know how to bake macaroni and cheese? Because that's patently false and honestly kinda offensive.
The white people in my family certainly don't. They're all too busy trying bullshit recipes that use ingredients in unconventional ways which turn out terrible because if they weren't terrible those recipes would already be well known, or not knowing how to cook anything that doesn't come out of a box/freezer bag.
Yourself included?
No, i put in the minimal effort required to produce food that's actually good.
Okay well next time before generalizing your family as the entirety of white people, maybe stop to consider whether you're including yourself in that before posting it?
It is a generalization based off the very accurate stereotype that a fuckload of white people can't cook for shit. Myself included for a very long time until I learned. Get over yourself.
So we're doing stereotypes now? I didn't realize those were back in.
You get over yourself.
Dum