Macaroni cheese recipe

As autumn approaches, I start thinking about comfy jumpers, the big coat, and hot comfort food for lunch. Macaroni cheese’s extreme blandness delivers hot comfort food with low cognitive load, ideal for a lunch break on a busy working day.

As a bonus, cooking a single portion from time to time lets you practice making a cheese sauce, which you can use in other classic bland English recipes, such as cauliflower cheese.

Ingredients – serves one

A single portion makes the dish faster and easier to prepare: less cheese to grate, and a lower risk of lumpy sauce.

• 80 g straight macaroni
• 10 g plain flour
• 10 g butter
• 100 ml milk
• 50 g mature cheddar, grated

Method

With practice, you can work faster, and finish the sauce before the pasta has finished cooking.

1. Boil the macaroni according to the direction on the packet
2. Put a small non-stick saucepan on a low heat.
3. Add the butter and flour.
4. Make a roux by mixing with a small (ideally silicone) spatula until no loose flour remains, and the mixture forms a single smooth lump.
5. Add a splash of milk, and stir into the mixture until it returns to a single smooth consistency.
6. Make a béchamel sauce, by repeating the previous step until you have used all of the milk, taking care to avoid lumps.
7. Make a cheese sauce, by stirring in the grated cheese.
8. When the macaroni has finished cooking, drain and stir into the cheese sauce.

Garnish (optional)

To add a contrast to the dish’s blandness, you can garnish the dish with a generous sprinkling of one of the following.

• Course-ground black pepper.
• Crispy fried onion (as used in South Asian rice dishes).
• Chopped fresh chives.

Tips

• After draining the macaroni, let it stand in the colander/sieve for 1 minute, to release steam and dry out, too avoid making the sauce runnier.
• Experiment with more sauce for the same amount of pasta.
• Experiment with more or less milk, to make the sauce runnier or thicker.

Variations

Take care when experimenting with extra ingredients, because strong flavours will spoil the dish’s signature blandness. Try adding one of the following.

• Mild instead of mature cheddar, to make it more bland.
• ¼ tsp mustard powder or English mustard, to make it less bland.
• ½ tsp turmeric, to make it more yellow, with a subtle extra flavour.
• Smoked salmon or bacon bits, to make it more tasty.
• Rendered bacon fat instead of butter, to make it less healthy.
• Seafood or shellfish, e.g. prawns, crab or lobster, to make it more fancy.

Unacceptable variations use cheese other than cheddar, which I consider incorrect, not least because a different cheese flavour fails to deliver the same nostalgic feeling. As a small child and fussy eater, I loved English-style macaroni cheese, precisely for its blandness.