If in Doubt, Add Cream: Three Cheese Macaroni Gratin
Nick Bramham shares his take on Poole’s macaroni gratin, an American diner classic, in the first of a new series focusing on the dishes he cooks most at home. Words and images by Nick Bramham.
Welcome to Vittles Cooking! This week’s newsletter is the first in a new regular column by Quality Wines head chef Nick Bramham, in which he’ll be sharing recipes for the dishes he most often cooks at home. First up is an indulgently creamy macaroni cheese.
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If in Doubt, Add Cream: Three Cheese Macaroni Gratin
Nick Bramham shares his take on Poole’s macaroni gratin, an American diner classic, in the first of a new series about the dishes he cooks at home. Words and images by Nick Bramham.
Poole’s is a modern diner in Raleigh, North Carolina. I've never been, but I did acquire their eponymous cookbook several years ago. As far as lightbulb moments go, reading their groundbreaking method for making macaroni gratin – their name for macaroni cheese – was like having a blindfold ripped off in Times Square on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight.
The debauched genius of it is in subbing the béchamel with a pot of double cream – which means no messing around with a roux. Cream is a fantastic emulsifying agent, as any line chef who’s had to fix a split beurre blanc while deep in the weeds will attest (quickly get a sautée pan over a hot flame, reduce some double cream, then furiously whisk in the broken sauce until everything is silky and homogeneous once more). Some cooks, naming no names, have even been known to add a ‘stabilising’ splash of cream to their sauce from the outset to prevent it from splitting in the first place.
In Poole’s macaroni cheese recipe, the cream’s emulsifying qualities are harnessed to make the most decadent and lusciously smooth cheese sauce I’ve ever encountered. Plus it’s a remarkably quick and easy recipe to put together – you grate the cheese while the pasta cooks, stir the cooked pasta and some of the cheese into a pan of reduced cream, then pour the lot into a baking dish, sprinkle over the remaining cheese, and blast under a very hot grill until golden brown and bubbling.
At Poole’s, they wisely use a pleasingly inoffensive blend of cheddar, Jarlsberg, and Grana Padano – this is an unequivocally rich dish, so including robust, stinky cheeses could easily tip the balance from comforting to challenging. I’ve tweaked the suggested cheeses and their ratio slightly to account for the higher fat content in British versus US cream, but I concur that a high-quality mature cheddar should make up the bulk of your mix. Whatever cheeses you ultimately choose, you’re going to need a highly acidic accompaniment to balance out all the richness: an enthusiastically dressed salad, a big pile of pickles, your favourite hot sauce, or – just to be on the safe side – all three.
Three Cheese Macaroni Gratin
Serves 1 as an indulgent dinner or 2 as a light lunch
Time 20 mins