Binging with Babish: Mac & Cheese from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Hey guys, welcome back to binge eating with Babish this week. We'll take a look at the special blue box prepared by Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. For this, of course, we will need 170 grams of dry pasta. and 36 grams of quote-unquote dried

cheese

products, which while delicious, we'll try to make our own from scratch, but first we'll be using a lot of paper towels in this recipe, so it's fitting that this episode is sponsored by Bounty Paper Towels , as you probably know if you've ever used them. The bouncy ones pick up spills faster than the leading common brand, so it would come in handy if you ever had to, say, clean up your seedy but somehow sexy dog ​​food and trailer full of cigarette butts bachelor pad bar we're preparing this week's titular meal I'm just going to read the instructions on the side of the box here hmm, bring 48 ounces of Los Angeles County groundwater to a furious, festering boil cook for 7 to 8 minutes until limp But tasty, return to the pot along with the granules, don't add milk, don't add butter, scrape the spoon against the sides of the stainless steel saucepan and delight in what you've come to call sustenance.

Wow, the instructions have really changed. Since I was a kid, I hope I don't have to tell you what it tastes like. It's a blue box. It's the same radioactive recipe that's been keeping bleary-eyed college students alive since the '30s. And I sure love it, but I think we can do it. a little better first with a variety of

cheese

powders, all widely available on Amazon. I'm also really excited about this butter powder in this buttermilk powder because hopefully they will make up for not adding any butter or milk, so let's formulate a cheese master blend.

The blue box package contains 236 grams of cheese product, so I will try to mix it up, but with a variety of cheeses, 21 grams of cheddar cheese powder, 5 grams of blue cheese powder, and 10 grams of parmesan cheese. add about 5 grams of butter milk powder and about 20 grams of butter powder when mixed with just a little water left over from cooking. Pasta should be a suitable substitute for the missing milk and butter. There you have it, our custom cheese powder. mixture that, although still quite artificial in flavor, tastes a hell of a lot more cheesy than the contents of the package.

Likewise, we are looking at one hundred and seventy grams of pasta. I'm going to use the same amount by weight of some dry elbow paste. Bring the water to a constant temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit and then add the pasta, ironically, for only five minutes, so if you were to make a large batch of cheese powder, this would be quicker to make than the blue box, Although that doesn't matter one bit. to almost dry pasta there's probably a quarter cup of pasta water we're going to add our cheese powder and like Cliff Booth we're going to mix it well with a wooden spoon until it looks like macaroni and cheese and I have to say I like it .

I have that processed electric orange cheese flavor you want, but it tastes a little more like real cheese and a little less bitter than the blue box, but can we make an instant version of this dish that tastes like real macaroni and cheese for that? We move on to the dehydrator where I have a selection of cheeses that have been dehydrating at 120 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12 hours, a process that as you can see has not been kind to everyone like the sharp cheddar and what this blue cheese has. It didn't really work at all, but it worked great with the cheeses I was most excited about, including grated parmesan and re-air, but also some sliced ​​white and yellow American cheese to give structure and creaminess to our final sauce, while the cheddar cheese is quite warped. will still work fine, I just have to take it off the drying rack and place it on some paper towels placed on a rimmed baking sheet.

I'm going to place another layer of paper towels on top and sandwich it all between two baking sheets pressing firmly and evenly to absorb as much of the oil expelled by the cheese during the drying process as possible, then we throw the cheese in the freezer for 30 minutes to make it as brittle as possible before placing it in a food processor and grinding it. We left this for about three minutes only to discover that our food processor does not have the power to pulverize this cheese into a powder. Turns out we're going to need a high-powered blender, so in other words, skip the food processor entirely and just pour it straight into a blender, juice it on high speed for about a minute until it's a fine powder, and you're done. , homemade dehydrated cheddar cheese powder made with real cheese is the only obvious difference between this one and the rest.

What it says on the package is that it is not shelf stable, but with the help of a food-grade desiccant it should last in the refrigerator for three to five months. I guess don't quote me on that, the only way to make a truly staple cheese on the shelves. The product is for freeze drying cheese, but home freeze dryers start at around $2,000, so it would be crazy for me to properly order one anyway. It will be here in about two weeks, in the mean

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we need to assemble our powdered macaroni and cheese master. I'm going to use equal parts American and Guerrier yellow cheddar cheese and then about half a part Parmesan.

This combination should give us a good balance of texture and flavor, but it still needs a few things, namely a pinch of kosher salt along with a tablespoon of buttermilk. powder and two tablespoons of powdered butter, then just to make sure that it forms a nice smooth cheese sauce, I'm going to run it through a fine mesh strainer to remove any big clumps and there you have it homemade cheese powder made entirely. from scratch and with real cheese, not the only thing we could do to make this more gourmet would be to make pasta from scratch, but that would be crazy, anyway we want to make the right kind of pasta dough for extrusion that is very dry. almost crumbly dough so in the bowl of a stand mixer I am mixing 300 grams of all purpose flour and 5 grams of kosher salt and crack 1 large egg which should weigh around 50 grams along with 80 grams. of water and 10 grams of olive oil what we are looking for here is a dough that barely comes together, at first it will look too dry, but as the flour hydrates you should be able to press it to form a cohesive ball of dough that falls apart with little effort, like any other pasta dough, we will press it into a disk to wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes, then we will sprinkle a rimmed baking sheet with plenty of flour, break up a couple of walnut sized pieces of our dough, roll over the flour, maybe have five or six of them ready to go, set our stand mixer on the highest speed with our bucatini plate installed on our pasta extruder and start beating the balls and the hopper, what a crazy phrase, then

once

the pasta is heated and comes out of the extrusion plate, we will cut it into small macaroni, a perfect pasta for the thin little thin noodles that we get out of the blue box, go ahead and shake them, mix and flour every I don't know how many noodles, so about 50, and rinse and repeat until all the pasta is gone.

Now, this paste is shelf stable, no, not at all, no, there was some good reason. for me to do it no, I really don't know where I'm going with this line of questioning, you bet your ass I don't know, anyway we're going to remove the excess flour from our macaroni by throwing it in a colander and there The noodles Homemade blue box pasta, a kind of fresh pasta, tends to cook much faster than dried ones, so we'll let it cook in boiling water for no more than 90 seconds or until tender but al dente, after that the we will drain pasta reserves about 1/2 cup of pasta cooking water which, as I discovered, we are going to need to make our cheese sauce because as you add the dry cheese sauce you will realize that it requires a lot of moisture to reconstitute and It's all going to get gummy pretty quickly, so starting with a little bit of pasta water, maybe a quarter cup, we're going to allow this cheese to slowly rehydrate, turning it first into a smooth and then sticky and stretchy cheese sauce.

I mean this. It behaves in a way that I didn't think powdered cheese could by virtue of the powdered milk and powdered butter coming together to form absolutely perfect macaroni and cheese. Now, this episode went completely off the rails. Yes, he did, but just look. Look how excited I am about this bowl of springy, steamy, gooey, cheesy macaroni and cheese. I have found triumph. I was really surprised and delighted with how this macaroni and cheese turned out. He's not just a member of the clean plates club. I counted it among my Best Achievements, okay, maybe that's not true, but it's actually very good and almost worth the effort.

I just want to thank Bounty Paper Towels again for sponsoring this episode. Bounty is twice as absorbent and picks up spills faster than the leading common brand. had the link in the video description to learn more about bouncy and get more

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to enjoy your macaroni and cheese when you choose the fastest top picker