Food Lab Basics: 3 Ingredient Macaroni and Cheese (1 Pot, 10 Minutes)

everyone this is Kenny Lopez Ulta I'm here at home again and today I'm going to show you how to make my three ingredient macaroni and cheese you might have seen this on our super simple recipe even right now you can get pretty much all the ingredients pasta you can use any shaped pasta really but well not any shape anything that's kind of short and stubby so macaroni shells penne this 12 ounces of pasta now one pound of pasta so I'm gonna look around six ounces of pasta in there so it doesn't really matter how much pasta you use the only real trick is that you want the same amount of pasta to cheese to secret ingredient by weight so you can agree to I'll show you in a second just enough cold water to cover the pasta just barely covered not very much water at all just a little pinch of salt you don't wanna solve this like you would normally salt your pasta water because it's gonna concentrate and reduce but you do want a little bit of salt in there so that the macaroni is not completely bland on its own all right so we're gonna let that start bubbling and meanwhile I'm gonna get my other ingredients so secret ingredient evaporated milk this is important because evaporated milk has condensed milk proteins in it and and that's what's actually gonna help the cheese from coagulating so when cheese heats up when cheese heats up it the proteins start to tighten up and unless there's something there to prevent the coat proteins from binding together they get tighter and tighter and tighter until eventually they start squeezing out fat and that's what that's how you end up with sort of clumpy clumpy cheese clumps with greasy with cheese grease coming out of it so equal parts by weight cheese dry pasta and evaporated milk not sweetened condensed milk evaporated milk you don't really have to be precise obviously I'm not I'm not weighing anything right now just kind of winging it but as long as it's in that ballpark you're gonna be fine a little plug for Tillamook cheddar it's from Oregon right Oregon yeah Oregon good stuff back in here um put anything in there mac and cheese say yes thank you some ham and frozen peas frozen peas are always controversial on mac and cheese some people dislike them I like them you got the kind of crappy ham right now because I didn't want to go to the fancy supermarkets where all the people still seem to not mind standing in line right next to each other so a lot of my ingredients are kind of the local corner bodega type stuff as long as you got a corner store you can make this dish the corner store in a pot and the heat source all right now what do we do well that pastas cooking now here we go it's already starting to boil stir it I'm gonna stir it pretty regularly you can do like maybe some you know what I'll answer some questions people ask me if my name is really Kenji Lopez alt yes that's my name there is no Kenji Lopez main my dad's last name was alt his mother was Houser and his father was alts they're from western Pennsylvania German descent my mother is from Japan she moved here when she was a teenager her last name was na Konishi so my first my name first name is James which is my paternal grandfather's name I never met him he died when my father was young my middle name is Kenji but ever since I was little I've gone by Kenji and so I was James Kenji alt for a long time and then when I got married to my wife Adriana Lopez we both changed our names - Lopez alt so that's how we get J Kenji Lopez alt when I first started coming a food writer writer my mother told me I should change my name to something that's more easy to remember because nobody would ever remember J Kenji Lopez alt or J Kenji alt at that point but I didn't and I think I'm kind of glad I did because she did not understand how the internet works and I guarantee there are no other J Kenji Lopes alts in the world so it makes it very easy for people to search for Marisa miles the other thing I'm going to do right now is I'm going to show you why bar keeper's friend is my favorite cleaning product and this is not an ad or product placement I just love it and it's a miracle and people always ask me how I get my pans clean I'll make it my um steel pans clean so if you got a steel pan and it looks like this which it sometimes does after you've been cooking with high heat a little moisture some bar keeper's friend and watch this pretty it works so much better than any other cleaning product it really it's not it's not useful in all metals it doesn't do the same job on say steel I'm sorry it doesn't do the same job in say aluminium but stainless steel I've got some tinned copper pans that it really works on I [Music] know you are you thinking to yourself why you're watching a YouTube video of somebody washing his pans I I would be thinking that oops forgot to get that side well you get the idea look at how clean that is I'll get the other side baby alright oops now the water is completely dried up actually it over dried a little bit I should have been focusing on it more but that's good that's fine the pasta is not quite done but it's getting close and you can see that pasta water is transferred it has a starchy slurry all over it from that well those starches that released from the pasta and then thickened up with the water um that's what's going to make our cheese sauce nice and smooth so I'm gonna add my I got a slightly bigger hold here don't do that with your like real expensive knives all right so I think I had about six ounces of pasta it scans 12 ounces so at half a can of this get the heat back down a little lower now now I'm gonna get my high oops where's my I don't know what I bench scraper grease now that's it we'll do it live all right in goes the cheese that's probably more than six ounces of cheese but I've never heard anyone complain that their macaroni cheese is too cheesy so if you've ever tried just throwing plain old shredded cheese unless it's American chief says American cheese melts no matter what you do to it but if you ever just tried throwing plain old shredded shredded cheese into a pot of pasta into some hot pasta you know again super goopy and stringy it leaks out fat it clumps it's not really funny but when you combine it with condensed milk and the starchy reduced pasta cooking water you can see it melts perfectly so gooey not clumpy nice and smooth glossy I should say I would call it glossy I'm gonna throw on some of those there's some peas that some of you are gonna really hate these are one of these things that actually work really well frozen because they're so small the enemy of freezing Islam is large large things I'm so what happens with large things is that as they start to freeze the exterior is freeze fastest freeze before the interiors are done and so that differential as it slowly freezes what happens is it creates ice crystals that can disrupt the texture of the food so breaks it breaks cells breaks down plant cells and it makes senator noisy but really small things like peas corn they work really well and if you're gonna if you are gonna freeze your fresh vegetables you should cut them into smaller pieces if it gets a little too tight like that little splash of milk a little smushed condensed milk cool loosen it right up might taste that mmm no pinch more salt I'm gonna go I like to add just a dash of hot sauce with Valentina today not enough to make it spicy but nice enough to mainly for that acid in the hot sauce just a little bit of acid all right so you see how smooth creamy that is and if you'll notice it takes just as long maybe even less time no I guess both of them it's the time it takes to cook the pasta just as long as you know I think just as long to make as the stuff that comes in a blue box which I'm not hating on my luck I lucked that stuff too it's a you know it's a good nostalgia trigger but this stuff is just better and it has a much better texture much better flavor because you can use real you know better cheese than the powder it's got that gooeyness it's delicious so three ingredient macaroni and cheese there you go in the future maybe since I'm answering questions about my name works out well today how about you guys leave questions down in the comments and in future videos whenever I have a free second I will try and answer some of those questions that could be about anything you want cooking me whatever preferably about cooking alright and remember to smash subscribe push the button yeah alright bye

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 922,132

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Id: kWge-2jT9ZQ

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020