This big boy stove top mac & cheese will take you back to your undergraduate days, except that this version’s ingredient list doesn’t contain sodium tripolyphosphate, yellows No. 5 & 6, or Velveeta. It’s a homemade stove top mac & cheese, modeled after Kraft, with a hit of bacon. And beer.

What you need to serve 6 as a main, 12 as a side:

1 lb bacon
Salt
1 lb elbow macaroni
Powdered milk (enough to make 3 cups of liquid milk)
5 1/2 Tbs butter
1/2 cup flour
2 cups (8 oz.) sharp cheddar, shredded
1/2 cup (2 oz.) Pecorino Romano or Parmesan
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 bottle of your favorite beer
1 Tbs pub sauce, optional
1 Tbs sriracha, optional
Freshly ground black pepper

How to do it:

1. Cook the bacon and chop it. Consider cooking the bacon in the oven (see note, below) to free up your stove top, so you can multitask. Of course, the bacon can be prepped well in advance. (Cooked, refrigerated bacon should come to room temperature before you use it.)
2. Put a pot of salted water on for the macaroni. Cook the macaroni to al dente.
3. Meanwhile, mix the powdered milk according to package directions, into a saucepan. Heat it until the first bubbles appear.
4. While that’s going on, melt the butter; add the flour and stir over low heat. Cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. If you find yourself waiting on the milk bubbles, try to keep the flour mixture cooking very slowly and keep stirring it.

5. Add the hot milk to the flour mixture; immediately whisk like a mad angel bent on the destruction of the wicked. Continue cooking and whisking until sauce is thick. Off flame. Congratulations, you’ve got yourself a béchamel.
6. Dump in the cheese and stir until it melts.
7. Season with mustard and way more salt that you probably anticipate (1/4-1/2 tsp), et voila. You have a cheese sauce, baby.
8. (Stir in pub sauce and/or sriracha.)
9. Thin out the sauce with beer. Make sure it’s a tasty beer that you really love. Proper technique must be observed: place the sauce over lowest heat, and stir in a heathy splash of beer. Take a swig for yourself. Check the consistency, and add more beer as necessary, continuing to alternate with splashes for the sauce, and swigs for yourself. Soon you’ll have something so tasty and pourable – the consistency of a thick cream – that your macaroni will be trying to leap from the strainer to jump in. And you’ll be in a great mood. Triple word score!
10. Pour the sauce into the (empty) pot you used for the macaroni. Add the macaroni, and toss. Serve immediately, garnished with bacon and pepper.

Of course you can substitute normal milk for reconstituted. I’m not a big fan of milk. Love it on cereal; need it for morning my cappuccino … other than that, just don’t care for it – nor should I, since adult human beings weren’t designed to consume it. I stock it only in small quantities, so it won’t go bad before I can finish it. When I crave cheese sauce and can’t be bothered to run to the quickie mart kitty corner from my building to buy milk, I turn to powdered milk – because it’s unlikely I’ll have three cups of liquid milk in the fridge.

Notes:

• The Pecorino moves the sauce toward the flavor of cheese popcorn.
• The pub sauce brings a surprising smoky flavor to the cheese, vaguely reminiscent of bar cheese.
• This is a versatile sauce. Forget the macaroni, leave the sauce on the decidedly thick side, and dip tortilla chips into it or plop a big, huge spoonful on top of some Sloppy Joe meat.
• Although it sounds delicious, don’t add jalapenos. That’s the mac & cheese of douchebags.
• You probably know that the alternative to making a stove top mac & cheese is to make a baked version, but did you know that you can make one using a carbonara method?
• About bacon in the oven … first, check out this link. Then come back here for my notes. First note: either use a pan that doesn’t need to be pretty, or line the pan with foil. Second: it’s difficult to separate bacon slices from the slab without stretching them. I do it this way: remove the bacon from its packaging. Turn it upside down and orient it so the long edges are north and south. Grab the edge of the second slice from the top, and peel its long edge from the rest of the slab, making the motion of your peel one that goes from south to north. You’ll have to work your way from east to west, and you may have to do it twice: first time peeling about half-way, second time peeling the rest of the way. You now have two pieces freed slices; grab them by the short edge, and peel them away from one another. Third: I can’t fit a whole pound of bacon into my sheet pan without overlapping them by about ⅛ – ¼ inch. Forth: if the end pieces are ready before the center pieces, remove them, flip the center pieces, and continue baking.

Stovetop Mac & Cheese with Bacon and Beer

I mean, who thought to drink cow’s milk in the first place? The first guy to think he was going to squeeze a cow’s tit and drink whatever came out was probably banished from his primitive gated community that catered to “just the right sort” of cavemen. Powdered milk, however, is something you should stock if you, like I, carry the Western-European mutation that allows you to tolerate it. Once Trump causes the next world war, and all the nukes he encouraged the world to make are now flying toward this great country of ours, don’t think about fleeing to Mexico. The wall works both ways, yo. Instead, crawl down into your bunker and know that at the very least you still have everything you need to make a decent latte, so long as you have powdered milk.

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Clicking on images will enlarge them. This content was not solicited, nor written in exchange for anything.

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