Making Cheese Sauce for Gourmet Macaroni & Cheese Recipe

Video Transcript

"Okay, so we’ve got our butter going into our hot pan, we want to melt that. That will take just a couple of seconds, you want to wait until it gets just a little foamy, so you want your flame about medium high. As you have probably noticed, I work on a very old fashioned stove. I know everybody wants to have a “Wolf’ range because it looks so great. I have been turning amazing meals out of this 1960’s electric pullout stove. Now if I can make gourmet meals on this baby, you can cook on anything, trust me. Okay, we are starting to get a nice melt here, we want to see a little bit of foam on this, it will take us just a minute to get this foamed up, the milk is hot so I want to turn this off. Now one of the things about an electric stove, if you happen to have an electric stove, that you need to know is that when you turn your stove off you’ve still got five minutes of residual heat that is going to be lowering so take that into consideration. That is how we burn food on electric stoves but if you have one you probably already know that. Okay, see we are getting some great bubbles in here, this is exciting, a lot of these bubbles have come in, I’m putting in my flour. So if you notice we have kind of a blonde paste and we don’t want it to get much darker than that, we are really just cooking off the flour flavor to our roué. I make this actually in bulk and I just keep it in my refrigerator and just grab a little chunk whenever I need it. We are ready for our milk so I am just going to strain this right through the strainer okay and this is exactly what we want to happen, we want this to come to a boil, because now it is going to start to thicken and you need to get your whisk going. The whisk does two things, it will avoid lumps coming in but it also helps to cool down the temperature so even though you are coming to a boil every time you are whisking air into it, you are emulsifying it more, you are creating a little more thickness, you are adding air to cool it down and we are creating the sauce. Okay it is starting to coat the back of the spoon; you can come in and take a look. What we want to do is get this to a point, where the back of the spoon, you take a finger and run it across will coat it, and this is perfect, we are ready to start to add some of the cheese. I’m heading over here for my first cheese, this is a creamy French cheese, this is what is going to give it that silky texture, and I don’t want you to worry whether or not the cheese is fully incorporated because once you get those into the oven it is going to incorporate more. Our next cheese is our Gouda, and the Gouda is going to give this Mac and Cheese and sort of nutty flavor, that distinguishes it from a regular Mac and Cheese. And this is a little goat cheddar, you’ll notice that it is all “g’s” I’m using in this cheese, I’ve nicknamed it lovingly the “G” force cheese. I went to see, I went to Cleveland to see the Blue Angels fly and there was a great guy there who told me he had fallen in love with this gal when he was on leave in Italy and so I decided to come home and create this particular pasta just for him. The “G” force Cheese, and finally we have got this cheese which is going to give it that great bite, a little bit of Bleu cheese, just heavenly and again don’t worry if it doesn’t melt all the way though because it is going to melt when we put it into our pan, and a little bit of goat cheese, now if it is seeming a little bit thick to you, and it is to me, you can grab a little bit of milk from your refrigerator and I advise using whole milk, don’t skimp on this. This is a great meal, it’s a fun meal, you are not going to eat the whole pot in one sitting, or maybe you are, but in general you are not. Okay, we’ve got a texture here, if you will look that is perfect, we have got a texture here that is perfect, that is what we want. You can still see some lumps in there, and that is okay, that is going to melt when we put it into our oven. And now, our pasta, now I have used a pasta that is not the traditional Mac pasta, I kind of like that shape of this, I think it is fun, it is kind of like a triple Mac, and that is going to go into our boiling water and the trick to this, is that you want to under cook your pasta. Also one cup of pasta is going to give you three cups of cooked pasta so I used about a cup and a quarter so I am going to have maybe four cups of cooked pasta. And again, our handy timer, pasta would normally cook eight to ten minutes, we are going to give this one, two, there, four, five, six minutes. "