How To Make Baked Macaroni And Cheese

Okay, so I'm going to show you how to make the cheese sauce that is going to be the base for your Macaroni and Cheese. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to start by making a roux. Now, I've got equal amounts of butter and plain flour here.

I'm going to pop that into my pan, and I'm going to mix that until the butter is melted. Okay, so, now I've got my butter and my flour in there, and the butter is melted. I just need to let that flour cook out a bit, because it's raw at the moment.

For all sauces, you're adding flour, you need to cook it out otherwise it's grainy. It won't be smooth until the flour is cooked. You also just want to develop the flavor in the roux, so I'm just going to cook it for a minute or two, keep it moving, you don't want to overcook it.

What I'm going to do now is just add a tiny bit of milk. Now, this is really important, you have to whisk it really soon after you add the milk. It's going to go really thick and sticky, you just want to add a bit at a time, and work your mixture into the milk.

You want the milk to all reduce off at the moment, if you put too much in, you can see, you get lumps in your milk. As long as all the milk gets incorporated and you give it a good whisk, you're going to avoid a lumpy sauce. We're doing this today, this basic white sauce, and we're going to add cheese to make a cheese sauce, but a roux is the basis for the whole number of sauces.

The important thing is that your sauce is going to carry on thickening, so you're going to cook it out a bit and it's going to get thicker, so you don't want to leave it - get it too thick at this stage. Keep adding your milk; this is one of those things that you kind of have to do a little bit by eye, depending on how thick you want your sauce to be. Now, we're going to add cheddar cheese to this, and that's going to obviously add a bit of thickness to it as well.

I think we're nearly there, as you can see. It's probably the thickness of maybe double cream, I'm going to add a little more milk, and whisk that through, and then I'm going to add my cheese, plenty of cheese in a cheese sauce, okay, mixing that in. And now, cook your sauce out for a couple of minutes, season it with lots of pepper, but check on the salt, though, because obviously cheese is very salty, so you might want a little pinch, but taste it, always tasting.

You can't eat something that hasn't been seasoned properly, and you can't season it if you don't taste it, so get involved with your food. So, black pepper, and I'm just going to taste it before I add the salt. It does need a little bit.

The next thing I'm going to do is just get my macaroni into my sauce. So, just add enough pasta that it's all coated really nicely. You don't want to stretch your sauce too thin and just end up with dry macaroni and cheese.

You want it really lovely and saucy because that's obviously going to reduce down when we back it. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to put the bacon in. It's personal taste, you can add anything you like, more bacon, less bacon, no bacon.

I'm going to pop that into my dish, and put in all of my tomatoes. I'm just going to nestle them into the top of the macaroni cheese. These have just been cooked in the oven on a low heat with some garlic and some thyme and some salt and pepper.

I'm going to put that lovely tomato oil on top, and I'm going to put a little handful more grated cheese, and I'm going to finish it off with some freshly ground black pepper. Obviously, if you're a vegetarian, you can leave out the bacon; the tomatoes, those are all optional. All you really need is your macaroni and your cheese sauce and you're good to go.

I'm going to pop that into the oven now, probably 20 to 25 minutes in quite a hot oven until all the cheese is melted and it's starting to kind of go golden brown and get a little crispy bits and then it will be ready to eat. Our baked macaroni and cheese has been