WHAT’S COOKING: Curly mac and cheese with bacon and blue cheese

Yes, I know there was blue cheese in yesterday’s recipe, dear attentive reader, but I’m in a blue cheese frame of mind this week for some reason.

Anyway, when The Foodie’s Wife suggests mac and cheese for supper, you don’t say, “Oh no, I was going to make liver and onions”. You make mac and cheese, that’s what you do. But maybe you switch it up a little. (Actually, you never tell the Foodie’s Wife you’re making liver and onions. More’s the pity – I grew up eating it once a week.)

There’s a lot of cooking involved in making macaroni cheese, especially if, like me, you add bits of this and that to elevate the dish. There’s the pasta that needs to be boiled, the béchamel to make, onions to fry, bacon to cook, and once you’ve combined it all in an oven dish and topped it with more cheese, you have to bake the blimmin’ thing. 

Then, to help it set a little, you have to let it stand for a quarter of an hour. So don’t start it at 6pm unless you want everyone to ask when the heck they’re getting their supper.

So, grab a packet of cavatappi next time you shop, and plan this version of mac and cheese. It’s generous on the sauce, as a good mac and cheese needs to be. Hence a whole litre of milk for the béchamel, which is swiftly turned into a cheese sauce by the addition of grated Cheddar and then some blue cheese.

Separately, you cook down some chopped onion with garlic, fry the bacon bits, and ultimately stir all that into the completed cheese sauce.

Everything ends up in a large oven dish – so choose your oven dish first and grease it with butter, to save time when the oven is hot and it’s time to bake it.

Tony’s curly mac cheese with bacon and blue cheese

(Serves 4-6)

Ingredients

250g cavatappi (spiral macaroni), boiled and drained

A dash of olive oil

1 white onion, peeled and finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

200g bacon bits

Butter for greasing the oven dish

For the cheese béchamel:

3 heaped Tbsp butter

3 heaped Tbsp flour

1 litre of full-cream milk

1 bay leaf

A sprinkling of ground nutmeg

2 cups grated Cheddar cheese

100g soft blue cheese (I used Danablu)

Salt and white pepper to taste

(Plus the cooked onion and bacon)

To finish:

Extra grated Cheddar cheese (as much as you like)

Microherbs for garnish (optional)

Method

Put a large, deep pot of plenty of cold water on a high heat and salt it lightly.

Peel and chop the onion and garlic.

Add a dash of olive oil to a heavy pot and put it on a moderate heat. Add the chopped onion and cook, stirring, for 3 or 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Remove the contents to a side-dish.

Add a little more oil and the bacon, and fry until crisp. Add to the onions in the side-dish.

Bring 1 litre of full-cream milk just to a boil with a bay leaf (i.e. until the milk starts to bubble at the edges of the pan). Grate a little fine nutmeg into it, salt it lightly and add a little white pepper to taste, stir, and turn the heat off. Remove the bay leaf.

In another pot, melt the butter, then turn off the heat. Stir in the flour off the heat, vigorously.

Put the pot on a low heat and start pouring in the milk a little at a time, stirring all the while with a wooden spoon or spatula.

Keep stirring on that low heat until all the milk has been added and the béchamel thickens.

Grate the Cheddar cheese and stir it in, on a low heat, stirring constantly.

Add the blue cheese and stir while it melts into the sauce.

Stir the cooked onion, garlic and bacon bits into the cheese sauce. Your sauce is ready.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Grease an oven dish which you judge to be large enough to hold this amount of food (2 to 2.5 litres in capacity).

Meanwhile, when the pot is boiling, add the cavatappi pasta spirals all at once, and immediately stir with a wooden spoon or spatula, otherwise the pasta will stick together in clumps (this is the secret to avoiding that).

Boil until the pasta is al dente, then drain in the sink. Add a drizzle of olive oil and toss the pasta in the colander.

Spoon the cheese sauce into the greased dish, and fold in the pasta using a ladle. Top with grated Cheddar cheese.

Bake in a preheated 180°C oven for 30 to 40 minutes or until the cheese on top is golden and beautiful. Turn the oven off and remove the mac and cheese to a rack.

Now you need to leave it to settle for 20 minutes, which makes it hold together better so that you can serve it in tidy portions – when it first comes out of the oven the sauce is runny.

I don’t serve mac and cheese with anything on the side, I don’t see the  point of it, but run up a simple salad if you like.

I garnished the finished dish with microherbs, only because I had them. Don’t feel you have to but it does look pretty.

(I say “serves 4-6”, you understand, but for us it was for 2, with leftovers.) DM

To buy a copy of Tony Jackman’s Retro Karoo Food (Penguin Random House) signed by the author in gold, send an email to him at tony@dailymaverick.co.za. Or buy it through the Daily Maverick Shop.

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award.