Hi Food Tube! Kerry Ann here. I'm going to show you one of my
all-time family favorite recipes. It's homemade macaroni cheese.
It's in my new book. It's a great recipe that's
simple. It's delicious. Everybody loves it.
You've got all the little crispy crunchy bits and then you've got the
ooey, gooey creamy bits inside. It's so cheesy.
Don't worry if you've never made it before. If you've never cooked anything before.
I'm gonna show you every step of the way. So keep calm
and let's get started. First we need a kilo
of macaroni pasta. Now I'm using macaroni
but that's just because that's what I like, but if you haven't got macaroni or you can't
find macoroni,
don't worry. If you've got some twists in one-side of the cupboard, some bows in the other
side. Mix them together as long as it's a kilo
you're good to go. So gonna put this in a pan
with some boiling salted water. In we go.
We'll give it a little stir,
just so the pasta doesn't stick together. And we want to boil that for about seven
to ten minutes. We don't want to cook it all the way through,
because it's gonna go in the oven and carry on cooking. Okay so the pasta is in,
and now I've got a nice medium-sized pan, just over a medium
heat, and to this gonna add 100 grams
of unsalted butter. And plop it in.
We're going to make a white sauce. Otherwise known as a bechamel sauce.
I know it sounds really posh, but don't worry. My Mum taught me how to
make this when I was about eight or nine. It's the most easiest sauce and
you can use it for so many different things. You can use it for lasagna, you can use it for cauliflower cheese,
you can use it as a base for your fish pie sauce. While the butter's melting I'm going to weigh
100 grams of plain all-purpose flour
and that goes straight into the butter, and we want to stir it for a few seconds.
Just to take the rawness off of
the flour it doesn't taste like flour when you eat it.
Now we're going to add some milk. I've got 1.2
litres of milk here, but we might not
use it all.
So we'll just put a little bit in for now. Stir that in and then
once this starts to thicken, come and have a look at this.
See. So it almost looks like a
dough.
You're probably thinking oh my god, that's not sauce. It will be. Swap from a wooden spoon to a whisk,
and bit more milk.
Whisk it in over the heat.
No matter how hard you try, you will splash this
on your cooker. There's no avoiding it. Sometimes you've got to make a mess. In with some more milk.
We add the milk gradually,
because if you put it all in at once you won't get the chance to beat it
into the flour, and then you will end up with lumps.
So I think that's enough milk for now. Let me just show you
consistency of this. Kinda like a a double cream
kinda consistency. Okay, so I'm gonna turn the heat
right down on here, and I'm going to add 2 tablespoons of
English mustard. It not only gives
a great tang, it also brings out
the flavour of the cheese and it makes it, I don't know why,
but it really does. It makes it taste a lot cheesier
as if you've put like a whole tonne of cheese in. Gonna come back to this sauce, but
as you can see the pasta is just where I need it to be,
and that can quite happily sit there for a minute.
Don't worry too much about it. Back to your sauce. I wanna add a nice generous pinch of salt
and a nice generous pinch of pepper and then
freshly ground nutmeg.
Now you can buy the already ground stuff, but when you grate it freshly
it just has so much more flavor so much more scent.
And it just tastes lovely. So I always put it in. My Mum told me to put it in
and I'm a girl that does what her Mum tells her to, so in we go with nutmeg.
So that's about 10 stokes. If you can see I've used literally that much. Look how pretty they are inside. Don't
you think that's beautiful, and it just smells so strong.
So here's our sauce. Now we're going to add
500 grams of mature cheddar. I've saved a piece to grate
over the top and the rest of it, I've grated. Now I know this seems like a lot
you can serve your family of four, family of six, and the rest
you can get those little foil containers chuck it in the freezer
one day when you come home from work and you just don't feel like cookin'
take it out of the freezer, bang it in the oven for 45 minutes. You've made your own ready meal.
How bad can that be? So what we want to do is we want to whisk in this cheese,
to melt it into the sauce. So now we need to grab our tray.
Whatever you've got, as long as it can go in the oven it's fine.
Trust me. I've done this in a cake tin before. Just because I couldn't be bothered to wash up,
but that's just between me and you.
Lets get some pasta, mix it together back in the pan that I boiled the pasta in,
because as again, you already know guys, I don't like washing up.
So I don't do it unless I really, really have to. So you'll see that this pasta's
kinda stuck together a little bit.
Don't worry. Don't panic. It's not a problem.
So in
with the cheese sauce. There we go.
Stir that around. You can smell the mustard,
get a little bit of a free facial at the same time because of the steam.
So, that's all mixed in.
Sometimes if I can't be bothered to do the whole oven part, I just give it to my children like this.
They love it, but they love it even more when it's in the oven. So,
we're gonna pour this into the tray. I've grated
some more cheese onto the board. Sprinkle that over the top.
What this will do when it goes in the oven it'll go all melty
and bubbly. I just love cheese. And then
we need a great big handful of stale bread crumbs.
Sprinkle those over the top. What the breadcrumbs are gonna do, is they're gonna
toast. So it's gonna make a really good crisp shell.
It's as easy as that guys. I told you. Simple yet effective.
Easy peasy, macoroni cheesy. Chuck this in the oven.
220 for 25-30 minutes or until
it's all golden brown and looking lovely.
Look at that! I think that's probably the best I've ever made
it.
Look how it's all golden and you can see it's all been bubblin' around the edges,
and it's all crispy. Listen, listen, listen.
Sounds so cool. Alright, I can't wait.
Lets get in.
Look at that! Can you see guys? We've got all the creamy ooey
gooeyness underneath. And then you've got the crispy
crummy cheesy bit at the top. Who's not gonna like, my mouth's watering so much.
I can't wait to eat it. And I'm just gonna serve this with a little bit of salad,
just a little bit plain green salad.
Give it a go. If you do like this, I've just launched my own channel
so please feel free to subscribe and
most excitingly of all, I've actually written a book.
So if you wanna have a little look at that, click the link.
That should take you to that. That one for the channel,
but most importantly have fun and enjoy yourself.
Happy cookin'.