Hi, I’m Chef Verra and today, we’re featuring traditional holiday dishes and we’ll be finishing the Baked Macaroni with aged cheddar. All right, we’re just about there. We’re going to add our cheese sauce over to our pasta dish. Before we do, we need to do a few extra additional things just to make sure we have it right what we wanted. I encourage you to always go and taste and check your sauce and see if you like it. See if it needs any adjusting. It needs more salt or it needs more pepper. I’m going to add now a little bit of chopped shallots to this dish. I like that oniony flavor to kind of be in there. Cheese and onions are just great. It works really well together. It goes really well in this dish. You add it right into the cheese sauce. I’m putting about one tablespoon in. Again, we don't cook by numbers here so you do everything to taste. You have an approximate amount of what makes it work really well together and from there we tweak it little bit. If you want it you can use a regular American cheddar or you could change and use blue cheese if you like. But for this particular day, we’re using aged white cheddar.
Now, we’re going to transfer this cheese sauce to our casserole and just again, so you can see the consistency. Remember what we started out with, a really kind of pasty mix of flour and butter. We then added cream to it. From that stage, we went from a roux to a fondue. We then added cheese to it and made it a cheese sauce. And you can see now just how smooth the sauce is nice and creamy. You could see the little bits of the shallots in there. Now we’re just going to transfer this sauce right over our pasta in casserole.
Also, remember when you’re making the pasta dish like I explained before, always put a little oil or butter or pan spray in the bottom, just so that it doesn't stick too much and burn on the bottom. It may tend to get a little crisp, this is just help you avoid that and primarily we got to clean up at the end. You won’t have to deal so much of a hard job having to clean this casserole dishes out. That's just a little tip. Keep that in mind. Okay, so we’ve pour our cheese sauce on top. One last thing, because it is a big dish and it is going into the oven and for it to really have a nice presentation, try this extra a little bit. This is a breadcrumb topping. Now in this particular breadcrumb topping, we’ve added what we call fines herbs. Fines herbs will be a mixture of hard herbs. They have very nice aromatic smell to them. So it’ll be like thyme, rosemary.
You can use chives, parsley and so that's what we’ve done here. We’ve taken a little bit of those, chop them up really fine. And so the word fines in french is fine, which means you cut it really small so that it can be very edible. Now we have added just a little bit of some baking into this one as well. Put it all in a food processor. For this amount, we’ve took about a half a cup of breadcrumbs. About one tablespoon of combine fines herb, another tablespoon of baking and just another two tablespoons of parmesan cheese. All blended up or in a food processor. All blended up and then just sprinkle that right on top. This is ready to go. We’ll put in the oven. Pre-heat your oven to about 350 degrees, 375 depending on—you know your oven the best. Some ovens go a little bit hotter than actually the number reads so keep that in mind. That's why I usually start with 315 if you want to turn it up in the way through process you can. If you need to turn it down, you can also do that. Breadcrumb on top, nice and golden and take about 15 to 18 minutes depending on your oven and that's it.
Look how beautiful that Baked Macaroni with aged cheddar dish can be. Just right for a size for this holiday, any holiday, anytime of the year. Why wait for the holidays and that's how you make Baked Macaroni with aged cheddar. And coming up next will be one of my all time favorites. Warm cornbread stuffing with wild mushrooms, just fantastic.
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