As much as I enjoy eating and cooking US Mac and cheese, I love me some Käsespäzle. Oh so good. After we are allowed to travel again, I’m off the Germany for more.
> I love me some Käsespäzle. Oh so good. After we are allowed to travel again, I’m off the Germany for more.
While you're there, as I'm guessing you ate this in the South, have some extra cheesy Flammkuchen with a nice local Riesling. German cuisine is super utilitarian for the most part, with very little variation from the meat and 2 veg routines but Baden-Wuttenberg's amazing Agriculture and Vineyards make it stand out.
I'm partial to Baden-Wuttenberg (best Bretzel in the world) since that's where my family is from, but I won't deny that the Alsace has some amazing cuisine too. I consider their Flammkuchen to be the best, both the savory and sweet varieties.
My first taste of it was in Berlin at Markthalle Neun. The furthest south I’ve been is Schmalkalden, a tiny little town no one has ever heard of (at least in my experience). Bayern is planned for 2021.
Relative to a lot of pasta, the Spätzle for Käsespätzle are not that difficult to make yourself! The "official way" of shaping them involves a specialized tool, but you can also just use a knive to "swipe" portions of a board into boiling water, which is just a little slower.
You can also force the dough/batter through the holes of a box grater. Can be a bit of a mess, but the end result is basically the same as the specialized tool.
UK here. 'Macaroni cheese' was one of my mum's staple meals 50 years ago. I still make essentially her recipe when I need some quick comfort food. With a really powerful UK-style Cheddar; it's too bland with anything less than a strength 4 cheese.
Yes, as per the definition in richardfontana's comment. Some ovens in the UK have separate upper and lower compartments, and the smaller one can be switched between an oven and grill function, in which case the heat radiates from the top. This is also used for making toast.
In the US, this is usually called the "broil" setting. The gas ovens usually have the lower compartment for broiling but electric ovens just use the top heating element in the main compartment.
Substitute cauliflower for the macaroni, sprinkle breadcrumbs on top, and you get the classic British disk 'caulifower cheese'. A whole nother comfort food.
First off, its practically the national dish of Canada, the boxed Kraft version ("Kraft Dinner") is the is the most popular grocery item in Canada - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Dinner
Germans have pretty much the exact same thing in Kasespatzle (spätzle with cheese).
Depending how you want to define "mac and cheese," the original Italian preparation of fettuccine alfredo is pretty damn close, the only ingredients are pasta, butter, and cheese.
Käsespätzle is like if a Bavarian chef was asked to make "macaroni and cheese" but didn't really know what the actual ingredients were and just tried to wing it with what they had on hand.
Käsespätzle predates Krafts' sickening concoction, so just: no. Its more like some food scientist at Kraft decided to try to recreate something they dimly remember their ancestors cooking for them when they were a child, and having at hand an order from their boss to do something with the dried and hydrolysed whey left over from some other industrial process.
We have a couple dozen boxes of KD in the pantry. Toss in a half bag of frozen peas and a tin of tuna and you have lunch for all three of us secluded together.
We always pick up a case of 16 when it drops below $10.
Australia has the exact blue Kraft boxes in all supermarkets. Even back home in the Netherlands, macaroni and cheese is both in my children's "my first cookbook" style books, as well as various variations in my fashionable "comfort food" books. Also I somewhat collect old-ish cookbooks, and it's a staple in German and Belgian cookbooks from the 1950 onwards.
Macaroni & cheese used to be pretty popular in NL when I grew up and my sisters kids love it now. I have always (and still do) hated macaroni (although I love most other pasta) which made it all the more annoying when they made it at friends’ birthday parties when I was a kid.
Me neither. The basic standard pasta dish in the eighties and nineties in the Netherlands was macaroni or spaghetti with bolognese sauce topped with lots of grated Gouda cheese.
These days there is much more variety, and judging from the popularity of the many varieties of pasta and cheeses such as Pecorino and Parmesan in the supermarkets, many Dutch household have discovered the joys of cooking proper Italian pasta dishes. Plenty of folk here do use store-bought packages for the sauce of course, but these tend to focus on adding flavour to the meat and vegetables (tomato) that serve as the bulk of the sauce (like bolognese).
Frankly, the classic US mac-and-cheese dish looks disgusting. I can only imagine how it must look to someone with an Italian heritage.
The blue box not, but macaroni with ham & cheese is in every Albert Heijn, it's one of the ready made dishes that has been available as long as I can remember. Most 'warm at home' traiteur style shops, or butcher shops nowadays, sell it as part of their rotation. If you google ah recepten or big Dutch recipe sites, you'll find dozens of variations.
The 'Margriet' cookbook (to just take one example that represents mainstream Dutch cooking) has had a recipe since the first edition.
Yes on occasion, but I got a taste for it when I lived in the US for half a year, so...
You can find it in the "American" part of the international foods section of big grocery stores here, along with pancake mix, root beer and Skittles :P
They sell one brand of standard kraft-like box of it in some stores here in Norway. I buy it from time to time - I absolutely love cheap plain macaroni and cheese. One of the Norwegian companies have been selling a bag of it as well. While I didn't necessarily appreciate it, I'm guessing some people do.
Sidenote: The mac and cheese here all boasts how it is an American food. The box (that is like Kraft) has flags and stuff on it. Of course, they'll also sell an "American" ketchup next to a couple shelves of Heinz.
Don't get me started on buying "American" ketchup.
When I was 10 and overseas and could only find 'American ketchup' aka spilva (think red tomato sauce and sugar), I and my family by happenstance bought three bottles of Heinz ketchup from a Chili's Picca in downtown Riga, after stopping there to eat dinner in defeat, having shopped for real ketchup all day and come up empty.
I suspect by now that there are several grocery stores in Riga with Heinz brand ketchup, but at the time, there were none that we could find.
"Macaroni cheese" (no "&" or "and") has been a thing in the UK for a really long time, at least since my mother was a student (1980s) but probably earlier
The comparison to carbonara keeps coming up, but I don't really get it. Cheese is a component of carbonara, but it's as much about cured pork and egg. And the cheese is a salty and acidic sheep's milk cheese, nothing like varieties typically used in mac & cheese.
Edit: also long vs. short noodles. There's really no commonalities between the two besides the inclusion of noodles and cheese, which applies to probably hundreds of dishes.
Yeah, it's very common in the UK, although one of the great tragedies of the spread of veganism is that tasty vegetarian cheese dishes are becoming harder to come by in restaurants.
One thing I seem to observe in the US is macaroni cheese being used as a side-dish, and I think in many cases in the UK that would be replaced with cauliflower cheese, which seems like a complete waste of a good cheese sauce to me, but each to their own.
I hated it growing up as a kid, but my sister had am unfathomable predilection for that Kraft stuff in the blue box so we always had some, much like her affinity for Yoshinoya (which was like a blander version of our everyday meals at home) I always thought it could be better.
When I lived in Switzerland this dish made me appreciate what could out of come out of that blue box with some creativity:
The closest comparison is its like a Swiss take on a carbonara; gruyerre for the grautin and shaved emantaller to serve are the way to go after several experiments in my opinion.
The Apfelmus makes the dish, I personally like drinking Apfelmost while eating this dish, too.
Back when we were disgusting freshmen, we used to exchange "recipes" for how to make the Kraft box in our little hotpots in the dorms. I was partial to an extra dollop of cheez whiz. The guy down the hall swore by a half a brick of cream cheese. Sometimes I'd splurge with a bit of port wine cheese spread. The sophomore down the hall blew my mind when we had a double date in his room, and he sprinkled some oregano into it. I had never even bought a spice jar before.
> Sometimes I'd splurge with a bit of port wine cheese spread.
Port wine cheese spread was my barometer of "fancy" in college. Impress the ladies AND their parents!! I was feeling nostalgic the other day and actually looked for it i the grocery store for COVID snacks. I asked the cheesemonger in the dairy section if they had any. She was sort of like, "Yuck! No way!" lol...
I'm going to have to give this a go. My lazy way of making mac and cheese is precisely due to the difficulty of making a good cheese sauce. lazy way: I layer in cooked butter coated macaroni and grated cheese then pour in milk to keep the macaroni moist. bake at 160C/325F for 30+ min. Comes out pretty good but lacks the silky texture of creamy mac and cheese.
Last time I tried making sauce the gooey cheese adhered to the spoon I was stirring with until it just gathered up all the cheese. I had a baseball of cheese on the spoon and a pot full of milk. So I had to really cook the hell out of it to get everything hot enough to melt which ruined the cheese. Then upon pouring into the cooler macaroni made it yet again clump up. It was a mess and tasted less cheesy and I attribute that to my desperate attempt to remelt the cheese into the milk. Still pretty edible though.
There are few hills I'm prepared to die on, but one of them is macaroni cheese. It should have two main ingredients: macaroni and cheese. No milk, no flour. It's called macaroni cheese after all, not macaroni in a cheesy white sauce :)
When it comes to flavourings I'm a liberal. Chorizo, freshly ground pepper or just worcestershire sauce are all favourites. Capers work as well. Pickle (chutneys) too.
I've always found the béchamel-based "macaroni cheese" quite unpalatable. You can take the best pasta (like De Cecco), the best béchamel (made with quality butter and full-fat milk and simmered slowly with half an onion and cloves), and the best cheese directly from Cheddar itself but your macaroni cheese will be a dish so much less than the sum of its parts.
Even worse, the dish many are used to has none of those quality ingredients to begin with.
The real "secret" to Italian cooking is to let each ingredient shine to its fullest. For pasta this starts with correct matching of pasta shape and sauce. The correct shape of pasta can completely transform a dish. Ingredients are combined carefully such that no ingredients overwhelms another ingredient. Ingredients like garlic require the most care because improper use can easily mask other flavours.
An Italian equivalent would be to simply melt Gorgonzola with butter and cream in a saucepan and combine with home-made tagliatelle and Parmigiano-Regianno. Much more simple and shows off the character of the ingredients better. Another far superior dish is Carbonara which, again, takes a fraction of the time to prepare compared to macaroni cheese.
Take gode broth & do in an erþenpot, take flor of payndmayn & make þer of past wit water & make þer of thynne foyles as paper wiþ a roller, drye hyt hard & seeþ hyt in broth, take chese ruaynd grated & lay it in disther wiþ poudor douce & lay þer on loseyns ysode as hole as þou myȝt, & aboue poudor & chese and so twycs or þrycs & serue hit forth.
I highly recommend adding 1 slice of american, 1 slice of gouda and some shredded manchego. I generally prefer a fancy Mac, but when it comes to the blue box (or Annie's), this is my go-to combo.
My grandmother used to add some tomato paste when she made it for me as a child, which I absolutely loved.
Since I moved away from the USA, I haven't had a 'proper' Mac 'n Cheese in decades .. but its okay because I've found an alternative which is just as awesome:
* 1 Chopped onion
* 4 sticks Celery, cubed into small pieces
* Pasta (your choice, I usually use Spirelli)
* Blue Cheese - the delicious kind with mould
* Cream (I use soy-based cream lately)
Cook the onion until soft, add the celery, cook until softening (keep it firm) .. mix the Pasta (boiled of course, in a bit of salted water) .. crumble the blue cheese, add cream until the mixture thickens .. let it cool a little, serve.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadhttps://www.thedailymeal.com/travel/14-ways-people-make-mac-...
As much as I enjoy eating and cooking US Mac and cheese, I love me some Käsespäzle. Oh so good. After we are allowed to travel again, I’m off the Germany for more.
While you're there, as I'm guessing you ate this in the South, have some extra cheesy Flammkuchen with a nice local Riesling. German cuisine is super utilitarian for the most part, with very little variation from the meat and 2 veg routines but Baden-Wuttenberg's amazing Agriculture and Vineyards make it stand out.
Plus, I don't think they are allowed to call it "cheese" in Canada?
Recipe: Cook macaroni, or other short pasta
Meanwhile...
Melt butter
Stir in flour to get soft paste
Stir in milk and grated cheese
Stir until sauce cooked
Combine pasta and cheese sauce
Grill or oven bake for five to ten minutes
Substitute cauliflower for the macaroni, sprinkle breadcrumbs on top, and you get the classic British disk 'caulifower cheese'. A whole nother comfort food.
First off, its practically the national dish of Canada, the boxed Kraft version ("Kraft Dinner") is the is the most popular grocery item in Canada - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Dinner
Germans have pretty much the exact same thing in Kasespatzle (spätzle with cheese).
Depending how you want to define "mac and cheese," the original Italian preparation of fettuccine alfredo is pretty damn close, the only ingredients are pasta, butter, and cheese.
We always pick up a case of 16 when it drops below $10.
These days there is much more variety, and judging from the popularity of the many varieties of pasta and cheeses such as Pecorino and Parmesan in the supermarkets, many Dutch household have discovered the joys of cooking proper Italian pasta dishes. Plenty of folk here do use store-bought packages for the sauce of course, but these tend to focus on adding flavour to the meat and vegetables (tomato) that serve as the bulk of the sauce (like bolognese).
Frankly, the classic US mac-and-cheese dish looks disgusting. I can only imagine how it must look to someone with an Italian heritage.
The 'Margriet' cookbook (to just take one example that represents mainstream Dutch cooking) has had a recipe since the first edition.
You can find it in the "American" part of the international foods section of big grocery stores here, along with pancake mix, root beer and Skittles :P
Sidenote: The mac and cheese here all boasts how it is an American food. The box (that is like Kraft) has flags and stuff on it. Of course, they'll also sell an "American" ketchup next to a couple shelves of Heinz.
When I was 10 and overseas and could only find 'American ketchup' aka spilva (think red tomato sauce and sugar), I and my family by happenstance bought three bottles of Heinz ketchup from a Chili's Picca in downtown Riga, after stopping there to eat dinner in defeat, having shopped for real ketchup all day and come up empty.
I suspect by now that there are several grocery stores in Riga with Heinz brand ketchup, but at the time, there were none that we could find.
Edit: also long vs. short noodles. There's really no commonalities between the two besides the inclusion of noodles and cheese, which applies to probably hundreds of dishes.
One thing I seem to observe in the US is macaroni cheese being used as a side-dish, and I think in many cases in the UK that would be replaced with cauliflower cheese, which seems like a complete waste of a good cheese sauce to me, but each to their own.
When I lived in Switzerland this dish made me appreciate what could out of come out of that blue box with some creativity:
https://marlameridith.com/one-pot-swiss-alpine-macaroni-aelp...
The closest comparison is its like a Swiss take on a carbonara; gruyerre for the grautin and shaved emantaller to serve are the way to go after several experiments in my opinion.
The Apfelmus makes the dish, I personally like drinking Apfelmost while eating this dish, too.
Gruyere (from Gruyères, nice village to visit, including the Giger museum) and Emmentaler (from Emmental).
Port wine cheese spread was my barometer of "fancy" in college. Impress the ladies AND their parents!! I was feeling nostalgic the other day and actually looked for it i the grocery store for COVID snacks. I asked the cheesemonger in the dairy section if they had any. She was sort of like, "Yuck! No way!" lol...
Then make ball park nachos or perfect cacio e pepe.
Last time I tried making sauce the gooey cheese adhered to the spoon I was stirring with until it just gathered up all the cheese. I had a baseball of cheese on the spoon and a pot full of milk. So I had to really cook the hell out of it to get everything hot enough to melt which ruined the cheese. Then upon pouring into the cooler macaroni made it yet again clump up. It was a mess and tasted less cheesy and I attribute that to my desperate attempt to remelt the cheese into the milk. Still pretty edible though.
When it comes to flavourings I'm a liberal. Chorizo, freshly ground pepper or just worcestershire sauce are all favourites. Capers work as well. Pickle (chutneys) too.
Even worse, the dish many are used to has none of those quality ingredients to begin with.
The real "secret" to Italian cooking is to let each ingredient shine to its fullest. For pasta this starts with correct matching of pasta shape and sauce. The correct shape of pasta can completely transform a dish. Ingredients are combined carefully such that no ingredients overwhelms another ingredient. Ingredients like garlic require the most care because improper use can easily mask other flavours.
An Italian equivalent would be to simply melt Gorgonzola with butter and cream in a saucepan and combine with home-made tagliatelle and Parmigiano-Regianno. Much more simple and shows off the character of the ingredients better. Another far superior dish is Carbonara which, again, takes a fraction of the time to prepare compared to macaroni cheese.
Loseyns
Take gode broth & do in an erþenpot, take flor of payndmayn & make þer of past wit water & make þer of thynne foyles as paper wiþ a roller, drye hyt hard & seeþ hyt in broth, take chese ruaynd grated & lay it in disther wiþ poudor douce & lay þer on loseyns ysode as hole as þou myȝt, & aboue poudor & chese and so twycs or þrycs & serue hit forth.
My grandmother used to add some tomato paste when she made it for me as a child, which I absolutely loved.
* 1 Chopped onion * 4 sticks Celery, cubed into small pieces * Pasta (your choice, I usually use Spirelli) * Blue Cheese - the delicious kind with mould * Cream (I use soy-based cream lately)
Cook the onion until soft, add the celery, cook until softening (keep it firm) .. mix the Pasta (boiled of course, in a bit of salted water) .. crumble the blue cheese, add cream until the mixture thickens .. let it cool a little, serve.
A most suitable replacement.