Mac and Cheese Day

 

Today, July 14, is National Mac and Cheese Day!  Yesterday my wife and I tried a quaint country café in a small town outside of the Kansas City metropolitan area.  The meal included a side of mac and cheese.  It was OK, to be blunt, that's all it was.  But it was still a nice comfort food to eat.  Most of the time in restaurants, at least in my opinion, the mac and cheese is only OK.  It's often too liquidy, or the cheese flavor is too bland, or the pasta is not tender enough.

I'm a big fan of multiple cheeses in mac and cheese to give it lots of flavor, and a little pepper and dried mustard as well as a few other things; the pasta should be very tender; and too liquidy just isn't fun.  There should be a minimum level of viscosity to the cheese sauce.

The really hard thing about making good mac and cheese is whether or not it can be reheated and still be more than satisfactory.  I'm have three different mac and cheese recipes in my repertoire.  However, I only use one for orders on the website.  That's because the other two recipes, while excellent in all ways, only work when they are fresh.  Sometimes when sitting and chilling overnight, especially if the sauce is too liquidy, the pasta absorbs a lot of the moisture.  Sometimes the sauce simply can't take being reheated in a way that leaves the dish tasting at least close to the same level of excellence as when it's fresh.  Sometimes, especially with sub-par sauces, the sauce and cheese break down, separate, become yuchchchh!

So even though I have three recipes which I love and which have different flavors due to the types of cheeses in combination, two of them are only made for occasions when they will be eaten immediately.  The third one, after much testing when I was developing it, has proven itself to be very very good even after reheating.  It's even better when fresh, as almost all foods are.  But it's the one that can take reheating and still prompt an enthusiastic response from kids and adults and which can also satisfy my obsessive desire to make high quality, highly delicious food.

Never underestimate the significance of reheatability in foods.  Test them for it. Tweak them.  Do everything you can do in order to prove that they are reheatable on a consistent basis.  Then you never need to worry about the quality when eating them on Day 2 or 3 or 4.