Creamiest Macaroni And Cheese

Comfort food perfection! My favourite homemade Creamy Mac and Cheese ever! Great cheese combines with a super creamy sauce, for an absolutely creamy, dreamy mac and cheese.

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a bad Macaroni and Cheese. Let’s face it, a plate of pasta and cheese sauce going to be pretty good no matter the recipe you start with. But when I enjoyed a bowl of the famous Beecher’s Macaroni and Cheese when I was in Seattle, I realized that macaroni and cheese could be more than just good – it could be really great. I think it was great for two reasons – it had lots of a wonderful creamy sauce and it was made with a really great cheese (and it makes a huge difference!).

So like all food-obsessed people, I set out to recreate it when I returned home. Turns out, the Beecher macaroni and cheese recipe is available online, so it turned out that recreating it was going to be a lot easier than I thought 🙂 My next problem was that I was in Canada and that wonderful Beecher’s cheese isn’t available here. Thankfully, while Beecher’s is certainly great cheddar, there are a lot of other options available, as a great starting point for a perfect mac and cheese.

This isn’t the exact Beecher’s recipe, but it is certainly based on it. Of course, the cheese is different, but it is also comes about as a result of a “happy accident” I made when preparing the published Beecher’s recipe for the first time. You see, I failed to properly read the instructions and added all 4 cups of the cheese sauce to the dish, instead of the specified 2 cups. Yes, I accidentally doubled the sauce and found macaroni and cheese heaven! It should be no surprise, of course. If 2 cups of cheese sauce is good, 4 cups has to be great, right? And great it was. The combination of extra, creamy sauce with really great cheddar was perfect.

Experiment with your favourite cheeses and make your own signature dish. I loved the combination of a nutty, super old (crumbly) white cheddar with the sharp Canadian MacLaren’s Imperial cold-packed cheese. (Using two different ones gives a nice depth of cheese flavour). If you don’t have access to MacLaren’s, use a nice, sharp orange cheddar or possibly another brand of cold pack cheddar. I topped mine off with a bit of Extra Old Balderson Cheddar.