Hacker News Reader

Comment by megameter | Hacker News Reader

The way my mom did it(and how I cooked it last night) does not even use a real roux: after dumping the pasta water, stir in chopped butter and then shredded cheese directly. The pasta's hot so everything melts in moments. This makes a non-creamy mac, but it's equally edible in my estimate.

View on HN

If you want the creaminess with similarly low effort, then instead of just dumping the pasta water and stirring the "roux" ingredients directly into the pasta, use a slotted spoon to take the pasta out of the water instead of the other way around. Pour out some of the pasta water, but not all of it. Now add your butter and shredded cheese, along with some sodium citrate ("sour salt"; it's an emulsifier), in a ratio of about 2-3% (by weight) of the total mass of butter and cheese. Stir it up until creamy, and then add the pasta back. It adds about 2 minutes' time to making it, but I personally like the result a whole lot better, even when I'm super super short on time. Sodium citrate is really just magical stuff.

You're almost done - just add evaporated milk, raw eggs, hot sauce, mustard powder, salt - you'll have the best mac and cheese ever (and still make the 20 minute deadline, you can just mix all things things in one bowl.)

That's almost exactly Alton Brown's recipe - he made it on YouTube a few months back. https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/stovetop-mac...

I'd argue you don't need salt if you salt the pasta water enough.

Since I didn't specify earlier when I wrote this post, if you're wondering the video he made it in - he and his wife have been live streaming on Youtube for the last year. They always make food (and mixed drinks), but its much more of an unstructured glimpse of their personal lives than a cooking show.

This is the episode where they make his mac and cheese recipe:

https://youtu.be/2aRzkIZna20

This sounds great. I usually Sriracha in my mac and cheese at the table, but I think I will try this. I am intrigued by the mustard powder. I bet it would go perfectly with some stir fried arugula/mustard greens and bacon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com