Exactly what we want! Making the perfect roux This allows each starch molecule to swell up and move freely around your sauce, which thickens it without becoming grainy. This prevents them from sticking together, but it doesn’t stop them from absorbing liquid.

When you first cook the flour in fat, it coats the starch particles. And hey presto, you’ve got a grainy or lumpy sauce! Yuck. When starch absorbs water, it doesn’t just swell. So why not just throw flour into a sauce to thicken it? This is the fundamental process behind how flour thickens a sauce. When flour, or more specifically the starch in flour, is exposed to water, it absorbs the water and swells. The role of flour is to thicken the white sauce. To overcome this, most mac and cheese recipes use a white sauce to carry the cheese. As it cools a little, it can hold together alright, but then as it cools more it tends to get firm and clumpy. When it’s hot it tends to be sticky and stringy. But on it’s own, cheese doesn’t make for a great sauce. So why do it? The role of a roux in mac and cheeseĪt it’s heart, mac and cheese is just that – pasta and cheese. Making a roux is fiddly and time consuming. Combine with your cooked pasta and warm it all through.

Make your bechamel into a mornay sauce by adding your cheese.

Make your roux into a bechamel (white) sauce by slowly adding milk.

Start with a roux of equal parts butter and flour.

Most of the stovetop recipes are based on the same basic process: The most popular approach is to make your mac and cheese entirely on the stovetop. With attention to a few tips it’s not hard to master, and a good white sauce really will make your mac and cheese beautifully smooth and creamy.

Based on the 20 recipes I reviewed you have a few good options available to you.īut if you’re avoiding flour because you’ve previously struggled with making your cheese sauce, I’d encourage you to read on. If you need to avoid flour for dietary reasons, then you should skip down to the section on making macaroni and cheese without flour. Why do you want mac and cheese without flour?

But before you do, I have a question for you. That’s not to say you can’t make mac and cheese without flour. And for the majority of these recipes, that ingredient is flour. Whichever approach you take, there’s always an ingredient included who’s role is to thicken the sauce. And these different methods each make multiple appearances across the recipes I reviewed (which are listed at the bottom of the page). And then there’s a third approach, which is a combination of the two. You can make it on the stovetop, or you can make it in the oven. There are two fundamentally different approaches to homemade mac and cheese. Read on to discover how to make mac and cheese without flour, but also how to make a better roux. Everyone loves mac & cheese, but making a roux (with flour) takes time and can be a pain to get right.

Mac and cheese without a roux