Mac & Cheese w/Bechamel Cheese Sauce

This is a bit of work, but once you learn how to do it this way, it is by far the best mac & cheese method.

Ingredients:
- cooked pasta (elbow noodles work well)
- 1 + 1/4 cup grated cheese (experiment! Melody likes a Mexican cheese blend)
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1/4 cup flour
- 2 cups whole milk
- bread crumbs (Panko is great)
- seasoning (salt, pepper, nutmeg is awesome! Anything else you like)

Bechamel is a French white sauce, and if you learn how to make it, it is also a great way to make Fettuccine Alfredo and many other things. A bechamel is made from yet another French technique call a roux.

Here is the hierarchy:
> Mac & Cheese
>>> Bechamel
>>>>>> Roux

This all goes very fast, so first you need to do your "mise en place", which is French for "get all your f'ing ingredients ready before starting to cook".

Mise en place:

So, we make the roux first. A roux is browned butter and flour.

Then Bechamel is then made by adding milk to the roux.

Then the Mac & Cheese sauce is made by adding cheese to the bechamel.

There are a couple important things to make roux and bechamel:

1. The ratio is important - for the roux, you use 1 part butter and 1 part flour. For the bechamel, you use 8 parts milk to 1 part roux.

2. The roux is made first by melting butter and stirring in flour. This actually has to cook together 1-3 minutes, and just brown slightly. You are actually cooking the flour in butter. If you don't cook the flour, it will taste like raw flour (imagine eating a spoon of flour... not good).

3. You need a whisk, and you need to stir constantly over the right heat. The heat is pretty low, but still high enough to get things bubbling gently.

4. Important!! Season your bechamel - put in a little salt as your cooking it, and taste often. It is difficult to season this after the fact. You can add other spices, like nutmeg, pepper, paprika, it is great to experiment. But salt is pretty important or it just tastes pasty.

If you do those things right, you will have an excellent bechamel.

Once you have made bechamel, you can melt cheese into it - right away!! Don't wait. The result is the best mac & cheese sauce possible.

The ratios stay constant, and in our case to make enough bechamel cheese sauce to cover 1 box of macaroni, you need:

1/4 butter
1/4 cup flour (1:1 flour/butter makes roux)
2 cups milk (8:1 milk to roux)
1 1/4 cup cheese

Watch this video - great explanation of bechamel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aeCJGmEXqE

Mix your COOKED pasta with your finished bechamel. It's good to do this in a large bowl to get everything even.

Put in a baking dish, and sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs.

Bake in a 350 degree oven about 20 minutes - wait for the top to brown, and maybe a little bubbly cheese. Everything is cooked already, so you are mostly browning things and making the cheese sticky.