How to Make Gourmet Mac and Cheese
Bringing the people behind our food to life. Hi, I’m Chef Jack, welcome to my kitchen and you know I love to cook gourmet food. But you know sometimes that word “gourmet” gets in people’s way they don’t understand it. It’s not a mystical word, it just means maybe its some ingredients that you haven’t used before; maybe something that’s just a little bit different or a preparation or something like that work, it’s just makes a little different and you want to kind of show off just a little bit with your ingredients. Now I’m going to take one of the basics here, one of the basic comfort foods of our whole universe, Mac and Cheese. There’s no blue boxes around here and this is right from scratch. So, and we’re going to make it gourmet Mac and Cheese. Start off with a little elbow macaroni that I’ve cooked al dente; al dente just means “to the tooth”, that just means its firm, its not mushy, and since we’re going to bake this in the oven we’re going to add some cream to it, we don’t want it overcooked so it turns out (0:01:06.6) and all mushy and everything. So this is al dente; now we’re going to use some ingredients that maybe you’ve heard of before and maybe you wouldn’t associate with Mac and Cheese, we’re going to make a four-cheese sauce, so right away we’re not going to use anything powdered or anything like that. Now, to my, al dente macaroni here, I’m going to add some Gouda Cheese; now there’s a lot of time to Gouda and eat them, that stuff from Denmark comes in at a round container that’s a bright red, has a wax covering on the outside; and we shred this all, all these cheese so that it’s going to melt all in our Mac. Now this is called Fontina, and this another good cheese from Europe, from Denmark and it’s a good melting cheese. This one here is called Emmenthaler; an Emmenthaler is a Swiss cheese, this is actually a domestic Swiss cheese that’s a process; so there’s three of our cheeses right there. So we just kind of turn those into to a casserole dish, we’re going to make a casserole here that we’ll try to feed about three or four people. Now we start adding some unique ingredients; these are sun-dried tomatoes, and so we’re going to put some color in here, we’re going to have a little color with some diced sun-dried tomatoes. And this is prosciutto, a nice Italian ham, very thinly sliced; we’ll put a little prosciutto in there. Now, another thing that you can add to it to make it gourmet and some things that are not used all the time in Mac and Cheese are mushrooms. These are shitakes and these are dried mushrooms that kind of rejuvenated them with some hot water, make them nice and soft, just kind of cut them in half. You could use, if mushrooms are in season, get some shitakes get some porcinis, porcini mushrooms are actually very good for this too, and if you could find those good chanterelles, the bright yellow ones, the chanterelles, kind of turn some of those in. So right away we’ve got some ingredients that you won’t find in those blue boxes that you buy at the store, but we’re going to make a very, very delicious cheese. Now once we kind of turn these all together and get this all mixed up together in here, we’re going to add some cream. Now if you don’t want heavy cream, this is 40% butterfat cream, I just love using this, because in the carton it says, “at least 40% butterfat” so this might be 41-42-43, we don’t know, love that word “at least”. So we just put a little bit in there just to kind of get this wet and get it all smooth together, we’re going to bake this in a 350 degree oven for about ten minutes, and since the macaroni is already cooked, everything else just have to kind of melt and kind of come together. Now for our topping for this, we’re going to add the fourth cheese; this is Parmigiano Reggiano cheese which is a nice Italian cheese and we’re going to put some of that right on top. And make kind of a little topping on it, and then I’m going to use some bread crumbs, these are Panko breadcrumb, which is the Japanese seasoned breadcrumbs. I like using this cause they’re very coarse, they’ve got just a little bit of salt and yeast in them, so we’re going to make kind of a little crust on top, you’ve all seen that when it comes out of the oven that’s nice and bubbling and crusty and we’ll put a little bit of Panko type breadcrumbs right on top. And then just a little more cheese, just a little more, just to kind of melt on top, add just a little bit of cracked fresh pepper on there; couple of little things that you can on this, you could put fresh crab on here right on top of that and wouldn’t that be interesting to have all that melting cheese and crab all bubbling together in there. So, yeah this is exciting here. So we’re going to take this and what we’ve done here is in just a few minutes, put together a gourmet Mac and Cheese and we’ll show you when this comes out of the oven. This is ready to go right now, look at that, it’s nice and brown, how yummy is that?