Recipe Review: Baked Mac and Cheese

Haley Cannavan

This childhood classic from the Food Network Kitchen is sure to be a vegetarian favorite! Their Baked Mac and Cheese recipe serves six to eight and couldn’t be any more simple.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Kosher salt

1 lb macaroni noodles 

3 cups whole milk

4 eggs

4 cups of shredded cheddar cheese

To make this macaroni and cheese, start by preheating the oven to 350 degrees and buttering a three quart casserole dish. 

While the oven preheats, boil a large pot of salted water. Cook the entire pound of macaroni noodles according to the box’s instructions. Once the noodles have finished boiling, add the butter and coat. 

In a separate bowl, combine the milk, eggs, and two teaspoons of salt. Add the mixture along with the shredded cheese to the noodles and stir, then pour into the casserole dish. Bake for about 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is browned and bubbling. 

I utterly screwed this recipe up, which is frankly very hard to do. My macaroni was entirely inedible, which was at no fault of the recipe. 

To start, I used ¾ of a cup of cheese rather than ¾ quarters of a pound, which is how the original recipe lists the four cups of cheese. Even when I doubled the cheese because it just looked wrong, it wasn’t close to enough cheese. I also accidentally used skim milk rather than whole milk, which caused the custard to essentially curdle into chunks in the oven. The curdling was so bad I wasn’t even able to take a picture that hid it. 

I managed to eat a few bites of my version of the macaroni, which I would advise against. The entire top layer of noodles was hard, there was essentially no cheese, and the entire thing was weirdly greasy. It also made me horribly sick. 

From the couple of bites I choked down, I had a few notes. The entire thing is horrifically underseasoned. Because it’s so simple, this would be a great recipe to experiment with different flavors and seasoning mixtures. 

While I can’t really recommend this recipe because of how horribly making it went, I would love to try making it again. I’m very curious to see how this recipe tastes when it’s actually done properly and experiment to work out some of the flaws that I think the recipe might have, like the hard noodles on top.