Macaroni and cheese

There's got to be a hundred ways to do this. This is my way. One of them. One of hundreds.

pasta	sauce

Cheeses used for topping and for assemblage

topping	assemblage

The pasta dough needs to be dry and stiff to work well in the extruding machine. Much dryer than if you were rolling it out because that machine really crams it through the little holes. The dough was corrected with additional flour to make it crumbly. You stand there with a knife at the Bosch mixer on its side and whack off the pastas as they're extruded before they get too long. You have to feed the machine with crumbly dough and judge each whack depending on how fast they're extruding. It's fun. You can turn it up to fast. Reminds me of kindergarden Play Doh Spaghetti Factory except this time I have a knife. The resulting pasta is not dried so it cannot be al dente, which I'd actually prefer. I did not boil it in advance of baking and it would absorb more liquid so I made the sauce thinner than regular sauce. I was going for a sort of soupy dish, but it stiffened more than I anticipated. Leftovers can be warmed with yet more milk or cream to correct that without sacrificing flavor. I'll give it that -- it's very flavorful. Probably not kid-friendly.

You'll notice butter in both the topping and the sauce. Of course not a whole stick in both, but rather, just a few tablespoons. I'm just showing the word "butter."

Cheese in the topping and the assemblage. That's what gives the topping a nice crunch.

The photos are not clear. Layered, like a lasagna. The alternative is to mix it all in the pot of sauce and pour it into the dish. Either way seems fine.

In the end it's much easier to open a box and dump out a flavor packet. But where's the fun in that?