Comfort food with a twist
Cookbook elevates macaroni and cheese to tasty new levels,
There are few dishes more comforting than macaroni and cheese.
A childhood favourite, this infinitely adaptable dish can easily appease most eaters, from those with finicky palates to eaters seeking something more luxurious and interesting.
Sure, it’s essentially a simple combination of pasta and cheese melted into a béchamel sauce, but it’s so much more than just the sum of its parts.
Homeroom, a California restaurant that has built its menu around this dish, now has a cookbook of its recipes, from the Classic Mac to versions that use macaroni and cheese as a shepherd’s pie topper or include Dungeness crab.
The book from Allison Arevalo and Erin Wade includes side dishes and desserts served at the restaurant.
The simply named The Mac & Cheese Cookbook (Ten Speed Press) has 50 recipes plus troubleshooting tips, suggestions for customization and lots of mouth-watering photos.
A nice touch is each of the macaroni recipes comes with beer and wine suggestions.
All the macaroni recipes start with a batch of the restaurant’s recipe for Mac Sauce — their term for a standard béchamel. It makes sense not to write it out each time, though I don’t love flipping back and forth between recipes when cooking.
That could have been alleviated by my just concentrating on the Mac Sauce and then making the pasta dish instead of trying to multi-task.
In a high-volume restaurant like Homeroom, I’m sure it makes sense to make a giant batch of Mac Sauce and then use it for individual cheese sauces, but this proved a bit clunky at home.
When I make macaroni and cheese, I make a batch of béchamel, then throw the cheese right in, to melt before mixing it with the pasta in the pot it had been cooked in.
The extra step of combining the cheese and sauce in another pot and then adding the pasta felt unnecessary.
Also, I found it a bit perplexing that the basic Mac Sauce makes three cups, but every recipe except two (the Vegan Mac and Mac-Cakes) calls for only two cups of the béchamel.
I went for Classic Mac, which uses Cheddar and Pecorino Romano. The combination gave the macaroni a rich, smooth sauce with lots of flavour, beautiful in its simplicity and, of course, very comforting.