Smoke Your Mac, and Embrace the Many Cheeses of Mystery

If there’s one thing I hated about my childhood, and there were many candidates, it was the slimy, sulfurous hell that was my mom’s macaroni and cheese. 

I loved my mom. Unlike me, she had many endearing qualities. But she was one of those people who was not only a bad cook, but a bad cook who thought she was a good one. It was a terrible combination. She spent half her life angry at her family because we politely moved things around on our plates or secretly dropped half-chewed cud onto the floor for the dogs.

I blame Dad. He knew Mom for years before I was even born, years of consuming one substandard meal after another without saying anything but “Thank you, honey.” 

Pro tip: You can be grateful to someone even when their effort fails. That’s been the secret behind my many marriages.

Mac ’n’ cheese slid back into my otherwise most excellent life because of the reproductive proclivities of immediate relatives. We’ve got all these kids underfoot now, and for some reason, their parents bring their own detestable culinary standards with them, thinking they need to be fed stuff out of a box. 

These people intrude on my secretive KP compound way too often when the blue tarps come off the roof and boats for the summer. You dedicated readers already know I do not move gently through this world (see above reference to my many marriages). Therefore, not only did I figure out how to make mac from scratch, I decided to turn it into a day-long ordeal that reduced children to tears while punishing their parents by baking it in my wood-burning smoker, because it takes so damn long.

Smoked Mac ’n’ Cheese

Ingredients

• A pound of dried elbow macaroni will serve at least four adults, so scale up or down from there (with the pasta and everything else). I’ve done it with fresh, but it’s not worth it for baking.
• 1 stick or more of unsalted butter. 
• 1 cup panko bread crumbs. Way better than whatever the other kind is, or are.
• 1 big ole onion, chopped in half and sliced. Yellow preferred, red will work, but avoid sweet for this application.
• 3 or 4 cloves crushed and chopped garlic
• Couple tablespoons flour
• 1/4 cup or more heavy cream, probably more.
• 1 teaspoon snooty mustard
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce
• 2 cups cheeses of mystery

Procedure

1. Boil the pasta until not done. Out of the box, that’s usually 8 minutes or so. Drain and reserve pasta water. The pasta will continue to cook in its own heat, so hit it with a shot of olive oil to keep it from sticking everywhere while you do everything else. 

2. Sauté bread crumbs with a slab of butter in a great big oven-proof skillet. Add some flavor if you want. I use Old Bay right at the end, or agridulce paprika. Avoid salt at this stage; there’s going to be plenty later. Set aside. 

3. Melt half the remaining butter and caramelize the onion. If you haven’t done this before, that means low and slow, lid on for the first 15 minutes, and then maybe another hour, with an unhealthy dose of high-quality salt, something with character, until you’ve got coagulated jam. Add garlic at the end and set aside. (I love our sweet onions from Walla², but they don’t caramelize well, so don’t waste them on this.)

4. Add flour to the empty pan to absorb whatever butter is left, then add a tablespoon or so of each to make a roux, which will become the base of a béchamel sauce (named for the Marquis Louis de Béchamel, chief steward to Louis XIV, but there is a long chain of custody). If this is new to you, just know you’re cooking equal amounts of flour and butter (or any other tasty fat within reach), until it doesn’t smell like flour anymore, but before it starts to brown, about 5 minutes. A neat trick is to drain the onions over a saucer and use that stuff.

5. Stir in cream straight from the fridge. Some people will be all up in your business about this, but the cold liquid gives the fat-coated starch time to disperse evenly, instead of seizing up into lugubrious lumps. There’s no cheating your way around this. Life gives you lumps — keep stirring until they’re gone. (Again, I refer you to my many marriages.)

6. Take the skillet off the heat. Add your mustard and Worcestershire. It should look, taste, and feel like a hearty but thin milk gravy. Add pasta water by the tablespoon, if needed, and any fancy salt or pepper you’ve got handy. If it tastes gloomy, try a shot of sherry vinegar to brighten it up.

7. Stir your cheeses of mystery into the béchamel after it has cooled. Don’t be tempted by pre-shredded cheese, which is contaminated by preservatives that will break your sauce and your heart. But the rest of this is between you and your personal Cheese Gods. The standard go-to is Velveeta or some other rat-tested artery clogger, but I recommend nutty and savory Emmental and creamy Burrata. The first is the unassailable foundation of fondue — like, hello, it was made for this job — and the second brightens the flavor and adds a nice texture otherwise unobtainable, at least in my experience of all things fatty and fermented, including myself.

8. Add the onions and pasta, mix it all up, and spread the breadcrumbs on top. (Remember all that stuff, like, from two hours ago?) If it’s too thick to stir, add pasta water. Maybe throw in some chopped Calabrian or chipotle peppers here, too, or sautéed spinach and other slimy greens. That’ll make believers out of any whining relatives.

9. If you’ve got a smoker, it should already be smokin’ away at 225 or so. Put the mac in and stare at the thermometer for the next two hours while you relax and opine on permissive parenting. Otherwise, be a normal person and bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until brown, bubbly, and irresistibly cheesy.

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