True story: I learned how to cook because of macaroni and cheese. Every Friday, my elementary school let out at noon, and my dad would pick me up and drive me home. Then, I'd wait for my mom to get home and make me President's Choice White Cheddar Mac n' Cheese (KD but better =P) A couple of weeks she didn't get home until much later and I was SO hungry and SO impatient, that she finally told me that I should make it myself if I was going to complain that much. So I did. And then one week she got home early and offered to make it for me...and it tasted wrong! I always used less butter and more milk, and when mom made it for me again (just the way she always used to), it just wasn't as good as when I made it myself. For years, these were my two major motivations for cooking for myself - I could eat when I wanted, and I could make it just the way I liked it. Half the mayo, twice the pepper in my tuna salad; extra pineapple on my pizza; mushrooms in my chili. I guess in a way this suggested my eventual love of experimental cooking (every recipe could always be improved), but really at the time it was purely a matter of pragmatism. I also loved the Food Network, and wanted to try and test out some of the new skills I picked up from the shows I was watching.
Eventually, I moved past mac n' cheese in a box, and decided I wanted to make it "for reals". My mom's go-to macaroni and cheese recipe came from a microwave cookbook. Every aspect of the recipe, including the pasta, could be done in the microwave. When I first started making it myself, I made the sauce and the casserole in the microwave, but boiled the pasta on the stove. Eventually I hit the microwave-hating phase of my teens (it coincided with my "whipping egg whites by hand" phase), and I would make the sauce, the pasta, and the tomatoes on the stove (using every saucepan we had), and then bake the casserole. Tomatoes, you ask? Yes, I admit to absolutely loving tomatoes in macaroni and cheese, and not just the garden-variety canned diced tomatoes either (which is family tradition) - I would blanch and peel cherry tomatoes and then cut them up and mix them in. I also learned quickly that I wanted twice as much flavour in my bechamel sauce as I could get - twice the mustard, twice the Worcestershire sauce, twice the pepper, and only super-old cheddar would do. And every time I made the casserole, I always found it was slightly disappointing out of the oven - but reheated the next day, it was slightly dryer and totally amazing!
My macaroni and cheese exploits ended when I stopped being able to eat dairy - a sauce that's milk + two kinds of cheese is pretty much a write-off. But for the past six months I have been craving it like CRAZY. (I blame Burgoo and their amazing-smelling macaroni & cheese). I haven't quite been prepared to risk the pain of sitting down to a dish made purely of dairy and wheat, but I just could not shake the cravings. So I decided I was going to at least try and attempt a vegan, gluten-free version. Lots of googling turned up this recipe, which looked too good not to try.
This recipe, like many vegan, soy-free macaroni cheese recipes, is based around nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast, most produced by Red Star, has a cheesy-like taste (and is really good on popcorn!) I highly recommend buying it in bulk; I didn't, and it was wickedly expensive (and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with a full bag of it). Several specialty stores on Commercial Drive carry it in bulk, and I would guess that Greens will have it as well once they get their bulk section in place. Other fancy ingredients in this recipe include sweet rice flour (more commonly marketed as glutinous rice flour). I picked up a bag for something like $2 at one of the Asian produce stores on Broadway near Macdonald, but I've seen it around many, many different independent grocery stores in the city. Bechamel sauce, the basis of a macaroni and cheese sauce, depends on a roux (a cooked mixture of fat and flour) to thicken properly. The glutinous nature of sweet rice flour (which, as I noted here, does not actually contain gluten, despite its name) helps with the thickening process, and is the recommended gluten-free substitute for this particular application.
I made the recipe pretty much as written, choosing the Almond Milk, Tahini and Rice Vinegar options, since they were what I had to hand; I also added one clove chopped garlic to the olive oil right before adding the flour, instead of adding garlic powder. I used elbow macaroni rather than penne, because it's not mac n' cheese without mac, and I omitted the gluten-free bread crumbs because they were expensive. I found that it took much, much longer for my roux to thicken than the recipe suggested; I think I should have cooked the flour for longer than the suggested 10 seconds before adding the milk (in which case don't add raw garlic at that point, it will burn). I just kept simmering the milk/flour/oil mixture til it thickened, though, and it turned out fine.
Overall opinion: as a pasta casserole, it was tasty. As a macaroni cheese substitute, it was a bit sub-par. Which is fair enough, given it contains absolutely no cheese. It was much tastier with ketchup, which as a kid was always how I rescued leftover KD or other mac n' cheese dishes. But I found that, rather like the old macaroni and cheese casseroles I used to make, it tasted much better reheated than it did straight out of the oven. Improvements for next time: as usual for me, kick all the flavouring agents up a notch (especially the mustard, the onion and the pepper). And I want so many more tomatoes, because the grape tomatoes were DELICIOUS and roasted and matched the casserole perfectly. Next time I'll probably throw in a container or two and mix it into the sauce. And I'll probably add a few dashes of hot sauce to the sauce; my roommate suggested putting hot sauce on it after the fact and it definitely helped. By the time I'd finished eating my several days of leftovers, however, I was quite enchanted with this recipe; and since I went out and bought all the special ingredients for it, I'm sure I'll make it again.
My non-vegan, non-gluten-free friends tried the casserole out of curiosity, and I found their comments interesting. One said that it perfectly achieved the creaminess of real macaroni & cheese, and that for him, texture was much more important than taste; so he approved. Several others said that it was very tasty and kind of cheesy, and if they could just put Parmesan on top it would be perfect. Which was encouraging to me, that I might be able to some day use this dish to entertain, and just provide grated Parmesan for those who could eat it to sprinkle on top.
No pictures this time, sorry - I completely forgot. But I'm sure I will make this recipe again (changed subtly of course), and I'll post an update and hopefully some snapshots.
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