Sunday baked mac and cheese
Velvety inside, golden crust on top. The dish every holiday table saves room for.
55 min
Liner notes
Baked mac and cheese is the Black church cookbook's crown jewel and the potluck dish that always runs out first. Thomas Jefferson brought a pasta machine home from Europe and his cousin Mary Randolph published a baked macaroni and cheese in 1824, but it was generations of Southern home cooks who turned it into Sunday's main event — triple cheese, golden lid, no shortcuts taken.
- Track 1 · Why it hits
- The roux-and-milk béchamel is what keeps it creamy; cheese alone breaks and goes greasy in the oven. Undercooking the pasta by two minutes buys you the difference back while it bakes in the sauce. And adding the cheese off the heat is the whole fight between smooth and grainy, won in advance.
- Track 2 · Backstage tip
- Shred the cheese yourself. Pre-shredded bags are coated in cellulose to stop clumping — the same powder that stops clumping stops melting, and it leaves the sauce chalky.
Ingredients
8 servings
Steps
- 1Heat the oven to 375°F and butter a 9x13 dish. Boil the macaroni 2 minutes shy of the box's time — it finishes cooking in the oven, and past that it turns to mush.
- 2Melt the butter in a large pot, whisk in the flour, and cook 2 minutes until it smells like toasted nuts. Whisk in the warm milk a cup at a time and simmer until it coats the back of a spoon.
- 3Kill the heat. Stir in the cheddar, gruyère, mustard powder, paprika and salt a handful at a time, waiting for each handful to melt before the next. Off the heat, so the sauce stays smooth instead of grainy.
- 4Fold in the drained pasta, tip it all into the dish, and scatter the parmesan over the top.
- 5Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is blistered gold and the edges bubble. Rest 10 minutes — the wait is what turns saucy into sliceable.