Gold Medal Mac & Cheese

This gold-medal recipe unlocks the hidden power of one magic store-cupboard ingredient to conquer macaroni & cheese once and for all.

This macaroni cheese doesn’t have any 21st-century next-gen bells or whistles. It’s just a wonderful, old-fashioned mac & cheese that promises BIG cheese flavour and plenty of it. Feel free to use any block cheese you like in this recipe, but a Red Leicester cheese offers the best balance of tang and savouriness, plus it lends that nostalgic raincoat yellow colour which reminds you of the old-school American macaroni cheese of days gone. The magic of this recipe comes down to one special ingredient that’s available in almost every supermarket. This ingredient creates an incredibly stable cheese sauce that is less likely to split or curdle the cheese on baking, even when using a more mature, high-quality cheeses, which often fall casualty to this at high temperatures. Feel free to use a combination of cheeses for this recipe if you have them to hand, but honestly, most of the time it’s best to spotlight a single cheese and keep it simple. This is a big recipe - feeding 8-10x - because I find a lot of people crawl out from under a rock when I make this. I suggest you do the same, but you can easily halve or quarter this recipe if needed - the same cooking times will apply. Let’s go!