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When I moved into my first apartment and made that fateful pilgrimage to Bed Bath & Beyond, a blender wasn’t even on my shopping list. In my mind, its uses were relegated to smoothies and frozen cocktails, and on top of that, an entry-levelVitamixwould have cost more than my entire kitchen budget. Even when I was finally given the surprisingly loud appliance for Christmas and began to explore the breadth of its utility, I never would’ve imagined it playing a role inmy favorite mac and cheese.
For the burgeoning home cook (or for me, at least), perfecting sauces can be an uphill climb. To make the basic cheese sauce you’re probably most familiar with (mornay), you must first make roux: Cook precise ratios of fat and flour, whisking constantly, until “the raw flour smell dissipates” (what?!). Slowly stream in cold milk, making a permanent mess of your stove, panically adjusting burners and whisking the sputtering paste until each little splash has been fully incorporated.
The cheese must be added during a fleeting, elusive window of time when it will melt but not overheat, lest it become borderline sandy in texture. Allow your attention to lapse, even for a moment, and you’re sloughing the lumpy mixture down the garbage disposal and starting from scratch. Oh, you want to bake your mac and cheese? Hope you enjoy crispy-dry pasta suspended above a greasy, broken sauce pooling in the bottom of your casserole. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but when it’s so supposedly simple to make, every botched batch weighs heavy on the soul.
I first realized that a blender could help with this while attempting to make an even fussier, more temperamental pasta: cacio e pepe. You think making roux is hard? Try emulsifying together hard, aged cheese with nothing more than starchy pasta water, pepper, and blind luck. If the pasta is a whisper too hot, the cheese breaks. If it sits for a moment too long, the cheese breaks. If a tree falls in the woods, the cheese breaks.
Then there was the added pressure of the episode being filmed formy YouTube channel:不是只有我之前尝试cacio e pepe been the subject of great public ridicule, but for this particular shoot, I had also made the brazen decision to prepare it in a $1,000 hollowed-out wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, like some sort of spoiled, drunken king. After five broken, oily bowls of abject failure, I finally followed the advice of celebrated Italian chef Luciano Monosilio: Bust out the blender. Instead of relying on residual cooking heat to melt and emulsify the cheese into a sauce, you pre-grate it into the jar of a blender and, while it’s running, slowly stream in pasta cooking water. The result is, frankly, remarkable: nothing but aged cheese and water, somehow whipped into a sauce that’s as smooth and creamy as it is virtually unbreakable. I have brought it to a straight-up simmer, for minutes on end, to no detriment of its viscosity or texture.
So how do we translate this groundbreaking technique to mac and cheese? Very simply, as it turns out. I cook my pasta in milk, which can be streamed right into the blender to form a sauce with the grated cheese. You could stop there, but for added stability and flavor, I add some egg yolks along with the cheese. This can cause the sauce to set up slightly more quickly, but a splash of hot milk or water will bring it oozing back to life.
At this point, that sauce is ready to toss with pasta and scoop onto dinner plates. In the mood for a baked mac and cheese? Just toss some toasted panko across the surface and stick it in the oven for 15 minutes.
As an added bonus, you can use virtually any cheese you want—normally, you’d steer clear of the more aged (and by extension, flavorful) stuff like Parmigiano or Gruyère, but thanks to the trusty tornado jar, even the funkiest old brick of bleu couldn’t break your spirits or your sauce. Even if you somehow managed to make a mess of it, a return visit to the whirring blades of death would set things right in no time.
This technique and hundreds of others are put to use in my new book,Basics With Babish: Recipes for Screwing Up, Trying Again, and Hitting it Out of the Park.So dust off the old Ninja you put on your wedding registry, and instead of making green juice or vegetable soup, put it to some delightfully less-healthy use: Whiz up the cheese sauce of your dreams. You can even use this technique to make your next carbonara.
Load up the blender with eggs and Parmigiano, combine a couple tablespoons of bacon fat with a cup of pasta cooking water, and slowly stream it in while the machine is running. No more scrambled egg pasta.
