Will It Be Sous Vide? Creamy Pasta and Cheese
Hello partners, and welcome back to the very nasty episode ofWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column that I do whatever you want with my Anova.
On this week’s sous video theme , we technically had the macaroni, cheese, and chili connection at least stellar, so I made an executive decision and opted for a mac, in part so I could hum “Mac (k) Returns” on throughout the experiment.
I probably don’t need to tell you that there are a ton of mac and cheese recipes out there, but I’m going anyway because there really are a ton of mac and cheese recipes out there. I didn’t have time to test them all, so I focused on my favorite: Ultra-Gooey Stovetop Mac and Cheese Recipe from Food Lab . Not only does this recipe make super creamy macaroni and cheese, but it’s pretty darn simple, so I figured this would be a good litmus test to see if there is any benefit to changing the cooking method. (I originally wanted to develop a recipe with melting salts like sodium citrate , but I gave it up for two reasons. First, sodium citrate isn’t what most home cooks have, but mostly because I would like devote an entire article to play with different combinations of cheeses and see how far we can push these salts.)
There are many sous-vide pasta sauce recipes out there, but I couldn’t find any to make real pasta. I knew from this Food Lab article that pasta technically doesn’t need to be boiled (and that starches begin to absorb water at 180 degrees Fahrenheit), and that they don’t even need to be cooked in large quantities. water. Kenji’s recipe contains a lot of water in the form of butter and milk, so I first wanted to try the throw it all in the bag and let the su-vidi gods figure it out.
I mixed a can of condensed milk, two eggs, two types of cheese (1/2 pound American and a pound of hot cheddar), cornstarch, hot sauce, and mustard together in a bowl, then poured it over a pound of dry pasta. Then I immersed it in a 180-degree bath and let it cook, taking it out every five minutes or so to knead everything around and stir.
It didn’t go very well. (Sounds of shock and disbelief.)
It didn’t go too bad, but it was definitely not the best mac and cheese I have ever eaten, and it didn’t even come close to the mac and cheese I made the usual way on the stove. By the time the noodles were cooked, which took fifty minutes, the cheese sauce froze and became lumpy, which I don’t want to describe my mac and cheese.
So it was unacceptable. The next logical step was to prepare the pasta and sauce in separate bags, but at the same temperature. (I also cut the recipe in half because throwing away a pound and a half of cheese was heartbreaking.) I poured the pasta into one bag, adding just enough water to cover it (and salt to taste), and immersing it in 180-degree water for 12 minutes.
In the meantime, I added the sauce ingredients to another bag and mixed everything around, right in the bag. I immersed this in the tub for the last five minutes of making the pasta, which was just enough to make everything smooth and creamy.
Well, there was one caveat to this whole “smooth” thing, but that’s because of the odd American cheese of a dubious nature that I bought in the wine cellar, not because of the method of preparation. I ran out of Kraft singles (which melted beautifully in the last experiment), and instead of walking to the grocery store 3/4 mile from my house, I decided to drop by the corner store half a block away. They had one pack of American cheese and it was a brand I had never heard of before, but I thought all American cheeses were about the same. (I was wrong, dear friends. I was wrong.) TL; DR, this shit melted badly, so get cheese you can trust.
ANYWAY. After twelve minutes in a hot bath – when I took out the bag every four minutes or so to stir it – the pasta was perfect al dente and I poured it into a bowl, leaving every bite of this starchy paste with water. (I fully expected this to stick together, but my fears were unfounded.)
I mixed the pasta and sauce and put everything in a cast iron pan.
Now I technically didn’t need to transfer it to the pan as this creamy Mac attack was quite usable as it is, but some of you have been talking about a squeeze factor that is easy to pick up. I sliced a bunch of cheese on top, sprinkled breadcrumbs on the whole mess, and very quickly tossed it into the brazier.
“How about setting it on fire?” I hear some of you shouting over the Internet. You can totally light it up and I was totally set – my flashlight even arrived on time! – but the two day delivery of my butane didn’t work for me and when I went to Kitchen Kaboodle to try and buy some, I found it was closed due to an explosion of a bagel shop next door . I took this as a sign that I was not destined to burn this week, so the brazier won and it did a decent job.
But back to our favorite question: will there be macaroni and sous vide?
Answer: Yes, but there is no real advantage. While the pasta and sauce were both good, neither was better than the traditional pasta or cheese, and certainly not faster. In fact, I think both preparations take about twenty minutes from the start, and the traditional method doesn’t require a two hundred dollar kitchen appliance. Thus, I declare this use of my Anova “stupid” and will not do it again. I had to go with chili, that’s what I say.