Some cookbooks will warn you to stick with eutectic cheeses when making macaroni and cheese if you want it all to come out all smooth and creamy. I can't blame them.
However, it's not strictly necessary.
I got my first hint from, ironically, the first cookbook I found that actually warned me not to use hard cheeses like sharp cheddar (presumably cheddar-flavored cheese melt product would only have shown up on their classiness radar) or asiago, which would tend to be gritty, or really delicate and non-uniform cheeses like bleu, which would tend to be runny and awful.
Well, turns out the key to the solution is in the problem itself.
The recipe I had been looking at did, actually, call for a little bit of cheddar, but only in quantities small enough to provide flavor without compromising the texture, and mixed with something well-behaved on the stove like mozzarella or provolone. Not bad advice.
There are probably some béchamel based recipes you could get away with adapting, too, but one thing at a time.
All I really had to do was take their advice without heeding their warnings. First, in the spirit of good pretentious dishes, I brought together a couple relatively highbrow cheeses: shredded hard cheese (I think my first attempt was with a medley of Parmesan, asiago, and romano) with no anti-caking ingredients and Roquefort, in approximately equal proportions. I used one pack of Roquefort, which is 3-4 ounces, so figure maybe half of one of those smaller jars of whichever hard cheese you prefer, or grate yourself a pile about the same size.
I put those in the food processor so the mixture could homogenize a bit while I worked on the other stuff. My thinking was that the mixing would be much more thorough than I could achieve by hand, and would be facilitated by the extremely high initial surface area of the hard cheese. Although the mixture did warm up some, it wasn't enough to cause the fats to melt and separate. I've had that happen with poorly planned homemade cheese dips before, and I hoped to tame the tendency by first blending two cheeses with complimentary defects.
I wanted a dish that would stay creamy, though, so into a saucepan over medium heat I put about 3-4 ounces of mozzarella (so we have about a 1:1:1 ratio of hard, delicate, and eutectic cheeses), a tablespoon or so of butter, and the better part of half a cup of milk. Maybe a bit more; if I recall correctly, I'd poured out a whole cup and ended up drinking some when I was satisfied with the consistency. Well, whatever you want to do; the creamy macaroni and cheeses I see on TV always look great but mine usually come out looking like a casserole so I probably underdo it. Anyway, I was afraid that if I didn't include something that was intended to melt smoothly, the pretentious part of the dish would disintegrate upon cooking or, worse yet, separate on the plate once it started to cool. A fondue or queso-style cheese should also perform this function well.
Okay, so: Got the creamy part of the sauce melted, got the pasta cooked (half a box of shells); put those two together, and as soon as it all starts looking consistent, add the hard-bleu cheese blend. If I were only using well-melting cheeses I probably would have turned off the burner and relied on residual heat from the pasta to finish the melting and avoid burning the bottom of the pan, but I wasn't sure it would be quite enough so I left the heat on low a little while longer and stirred vigorously.
It was just enough, or the mixture was more forgiving than I hoped. It was somehow sharp and smooth at the same time, pleasant but intense enough to demand a palate-cleansing drink to go along with it, with a possibly disturbing blue-flecked appearance. But hey, all that mold's cooked, so who cares?
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