Talking Food with Cory Bahr: Mac N Cheese

I'm Chef Cory Bahr, and today we're talking mac and cheese.

So we're gonna dive right in right now we've got our hot skillet on, or a hot pot, because this is the one-pot pasta. Just some butter in there. As the butters melting, we're gonna have some shallots, that's about two shallots, some garlic, that's about four or five cloves of garlic, and some andouille sausage. That kind of kicks it over that Louisiana flavor right there. Andouille mac and cheese... I mean, I don't know what could be better... And a little bit of cayenne. So we're just gonna let that cook for a couple of minutes till you can start smelling it really nice. It's fragrant, the onions are slightly soft. Now, remember, we do make our pasta fresh every day. But you know, this is what we're doing. We're starting with a pasta that we've already cooked just like you would at home. So you'd start the water, boil a little bit of salt, drain it, then make your sauce right in there. Smells great. So we're gonna actually start with our roux. Roux is for more than just gumbo.

You actually make a great macaroni and cheese sauce that way. We're just gonna stir this together to make a blonde roux.

You can see it's got a little bit of color to it because of the cayenne pepper. That's good. We just cooked that out a couple of minutes. Just to get that flour taste out of it. Get over there and you can see man it smells great in here. To this, we're gonna add some fresh ground black pepper.

And a healthy pinch of kosher salt. You guys out there know I love diamond crystal kosher and we have some cream. So we're going to add it slowly to our pot. The reason we add it slowly just like you're making a gravy you don't want lumps. Lumps are bad. We want the smoothest, creamiest, richest macaroni sauce we can make. Oh yeah, this is gonna be so good. Not only is this an easy dish, but this is something that pleases the whole family. So if you'll take a look at the sauce, that's why you got to keep whisking. Look how smooth and creamy that looks. That's just gonna make the best macaroni and cheese. All right. Now that that's cooked out.

We're going to add some Tillamook cheddar, this is a all natural cheese. Don't buy that processed stuff. You just stir that in off the heat like we are right here. Make sure you got your heat turned off. Oh yeah, that's gonna be great. Again, this is our pre-cooked pasta right here. We're just gonna add that right into our box.

I don't know about you, but I like my macaroni and cheese really creamy. So lots of sauce. So we're just gonna fold that in. We got delicious that looks, the kids are gonna flip out about this. I'm gonna put this into a baking dish that you could eat it right out of here, but I like to add a little bit of crunch to mine and I'm going to show you how I do that. This is making me so hungry.

And these are some toasted bread crumbs. And we're going to go into 350 degree oven for about seven or eight minutes.

There we go.

Seven minutes at 350 was perfect. Just get everything nice and brown and melty. I'm going to take a quick bite of this. Wow.

Tons of flavor. That crust on top is so clutch. It has a nice crunch. That little bit of heat from the Andouille, the cayenne pepper just bring it all together. I mean this is a Louisiana mac and cheese that everybody's gonna love. Hey, if you want to cook this recipe for yourself, go to KNOE.com and click on Talking Food.