Rosemary-Parmesan Mac ‘n’ Cheese

Foreword

We’ve found that homemade mac ‘n’ cheese is both great for date night and a real crowd-pleaser.

Ingredients

• 100g shredded parmesan cheese
• 4g sodium citrate
• 75g water
• 1 sprig of fresh rosemary
• 1 lb pasta (wagon wheels, radiatori, or rotini are suggested)
• Black pepper to taste

Directions

1. Take the leaves from the rosemary and blend them with the 75g of water.
2. In a saucepan, add cheese, rosemary water, and sodium citrate.
3. Cook at medium heat, stirring occasionally until melted.
4. Stir in freshly cracked black pepper to taste, if desired.
5. Remove from the heat and set aside.
6. Boil the pasta in water; undercook the pasta by 2 minutes.
7. Drain off all the water from the pasta and mix in the cheese sauce.
8. Continue cooking for 1 to 2 minutes, until the pasta is done.

Notes

Sodium citrate really ups the cheese sauce game of your kitchen. The sodium citrate binds to both the water and to the proteins in the cheese. This allows for a smooth cheese sauce without a flavor-muting roux and with much less risk of breaking. The resulting sauce is thinner but with a sharper, clearer flavor. Pasta shapes with many small cavities are the best for cheese sauce because they hold on to more sauce.

When finishing the pasta, it is preferable to undercook the pasta and then finish cooking it in the sauce - this allows the excess gluten strands to escape from the pasta and thicken the sauce, making it stick better to the pasta, while also transferring some of the flavor of the sauce into the pasta.

Instead of water and rosemary, another great option is to use beer.