Back story: my husband comes from a very Italian family. While I have an Irish heritage, my mother was a single parent for many years, so our spaghetti came from a box and the sauce from a jar. After I got married, it didn't take long for me to realize I had to learn a few things in the kitchen. So, by now I have mastered making what we affectionately refer to as "the sauce," or a good, from scratch marinara sauce. I also learned to make Bechamel and Alfredo and I've learned how to make my own pasta dough. So, I was feeling pretty confident when I decided to try my hand at home made mac-n-cheese.
Oops! If you have made cheese sauce from anything but Velveeta, you already know what I'm about to say. I took some milk, butter, salt and pepper, heated it up and threw in some cheese. After whisking furiously for 15 minutes, my cheese was not melting, but separating and hard. At this point I used my favorite kitchen tool: GOOGLE. I found a very helpful article on All Recipes about how to make cheese sauce.
Immediately I discovered my first mistake, which was too much heat. Also, I knew I needed a starch to thicken the sauce, but I should have had that incorporated before adding the cheese. So, refusing to call it a loss and waste everything, I cut a bit of cheese cloth (which was a mystery to me until recently, I found it in the fabric department) and used it to strain out the curdled cheese. By that I mean, lined a bowl with the cheese cloth, poured the sauce in, the gathered the cheese cloth and squeezed out the liquid. Then I threw the liquid back into my pan and brought it to a medium heat, lightly bubbling, so i could whisk in a bit of flour. Then I lowered the heat to low-med and added the cheese. Another tip from the article was to sprinkle a bit of an acid, like lemon juice, on the cheese before melting, to keep it from getting stringy. This worked very well. So, after a small bump in the road, we ate home made macaroni and cheese for lunch.
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