13 Celebrity Chef Tips For Making The Best Mac And Cheese Ever

It can be hard to approach making a dish as famous as mac and cheese. Although it's relatively simple once you have the concept down, you might have some initial questions about which method you should use or which ingredients you should buy. For example, you may ask yourself: What is the best type of cheese for homemade cheese sauce? Should you make it on the stovetop or bake it in the oven? For newer home cooks, it can be tricky to get the noodles to the ideal consistency or to find the right balance between too much sauce or an overly dry dish. Not to mention, you need the perfect amount of seasoning for it to have that extra oomph you're looking for.

Luckily, you've come to the right place, because we have many clever tips from celebrity chefs who can help you make the absolute tastiest mac and cheese. From David Chang to Sunny Anderson, these cooks have years of kitchen experience under their belts, so they know all the best ways to take this comfort food up a notch. Take note of a technique from one chef, or combine a few different methods, and you no longer need to worry about the quality of your dish. It'll be creamy, flavorful, and full of cheesy goodness.

Ina Garten's tip for tasty macaroni is to use truffle butter, which is essentially regular butter that's infused with the flavor of truffles. Truffles are a type of fungi that grows underground. They have a distinctly savory, musky flavor that works well with various dishes. 

Some truffle butters have actual truffle chunks mixed into them, while other kinds are made using truffle oil. Since most mac and cheese recipes require butter for their roux — a sauce made from a combination of fat and flour — Garten is clever to suggest truffle butter, because it's easy to incorporate. You can simply use truffle butter in place of regular butter in your recipe.

On the Food Network's YouTube channel, Garten shares her mac and cheese tip, explaining how she prefers to use white truffle butter. She heats it in the pan with the flour before she adds milk, cheese, and seasoning to finish the sauce. If all you have is black truffle butter, you can use it. However, it will make the sauce taste different, because black truffles have a slightly different flavor profile from white truffles. 

Out of all the different ways you can make cheesy pasta sauce, Wolfgang Puck has a most creative method: using a blender. In a TikTok video, the famous chef demonstrates how to make mac and cheese sauce in a countertop blender and why he recommends trying it out. Puck notes that it's straightforward, and takes just over 5 minutes — which is lightning-fast compared to other sauce-making methods. He also says the final product is exceptionally creamy and full of cheesy flavor.

You might wonder what he uses to thicken the sauce, since Puck uses this unconventional blender approach, instead of the traditional method of making a roux on the stovetop. Instead, Puck uses pieces of bread. He even tosses in some carrots for added color. Amazingly, his technique doesn't make the cheese clump or turn into a funky texture. As he removes the sauce from the blender, it has a smooth consistency. 

Remember that you will still need to bake the cooked noodles for a few minutes after you mix them with the sauce. This way, everything comes out at the same temperature and your topping has time to brown.

For celebrity chef Rachael Ray's show, fans submit cooking questions, which Ray then answers on camera. According to Ray, the secret to making the best mac and cheese is nailing your sauce. In a YouTube video, she explains that you should heat your milk with some crushed garlic before you add it to your roux.

Some folks might not heat their milk at all; they just dump cold milk into a hot pan containing their roux, but that isn't the most efficient way to go about it. This can sometimes cause your roux to become lumpy. It's better to heat your milk to a similar temperature, then slowly mix it in. Furthermore, when Ray warms the milk and garlic mixture, it gives time for the crushed garlic to steep, which adds a delicious umami flavor to the sauce. If you don't have fresh crushed garlic, you can use jarred minced garlic, which gives you a similar effect and saves time.

Celebrity chef Carla Hall explains on her blog that you should try to use a different topping for your mac and cheese. Where many people use Panko breadcrumbs, Hall recommends using cheddar and parmesan cheese crackers. Because the crackers are cheesy, it makes the dish taste richer. If you use Cheez-It crackers, for example, they contain extra seasonings too, which gives the topping plenty of flair. It also provides the creamy pasta dish with some crunch.

It's pretty easy to transform the crackers into breadcrumbs. You can simply run them through the food processor until they crumble into pieces. After pulsing the crackers in a food processor for a bit, you should add some melted butter, and then pulse them for longer. Hall also mentions that the mixture shouldn't be super fine (like sand). Instead, you want it to be coarser in texture. 

You likely use whole milk, cream, or a combination of both for your mac and cheese sauce. But in a YouTube video, Alton Brown recommends using evaporated milk instead, as it makes the sauce's consistency extra creamy. Don't worry, evaporated milk isn't super sweet — that's condensed milk. There are differences between condensed and evaporated milk, such as texture and sugar content, so be careful when you pick out the ingredients for your pasta dish.

Simply put, evaporated milk is exactly what it sounds like. Manufacturers remove much of the water from milk through evaporation, which makes it thicker — and they don't add sugar to it, unlike with condensed milk. Since this product is a different thickness than regular milk, don't just use it in any macaroni recipe. Instead, find a recipe with evaporated milk so the sauce turns out right.

If you're a fan of taking clever shortcuts when you cook, you'll love David Chang's recent advice on how to make one-pot mac and cheese in a wok. Specifically, he says to use a hybrid wok rather than other types of cookware. This facilitates the evaporation process, as the pasta simmers in the water. He explains that almost all the water is gone once you cook the pasta, so you don't need to strain any liquid. You can then build off of the remaining water to create the sauce with flour, cheese, milk, and other components.

Chang demonstrates how to do so in a short Instagram video, where his caption explains that he actually tried this technique because he was in a pinch, but the final product turned out impressive. If you try this yourself, just remember that the water should slightly cover the raw noodles when you begin. Otherwise, you have a surplus of liquid, which defeats the whole purpose of making it in a wok.