panera bread white mac and cheese recipe

We broke from tradition a little bit and added some heavy cream first. Now, to a roux, you’d usually add milk first to make a béchamel. Mix that flour in and cook until the raw flour smell goes away and the mixture starts smelling kind of nutty. Once that’s melted and just starting to bubble a little, you’ll want to add an equal amount of flour to your butter.

But back to our cheese sauce: to start making it, you’ll first want to melt some butter in the bottom of a saucepot. Whenever you make it, make sure it’s cooked al dente, as this will give us a good texture in our end-product. Measure out your ingredients and shred your cheese- no need to go super-fine here, it just needs to melt.Īs you’re making your cheese sauce, you’ll want to find time to get your pasta cooked as well. The cheese sauce, especially, will turn out a lot better if the ingredients have had a chance to warm up to room temperature. Being able to enjoy a restaurant dish I already love in the comfort of our home is always a win in my book.To start this recipe, you’ll want to get everything measured out and prepared from the very beginning. Actually, it’s better because it’s homemade (duh), because it’s okay if my daughter’s hair looks like someone gave her a swirly, and it’s okay if Andrew’s pants have a hole in the knee, or more likely that he’s wearing no pants at all. Somehow it’s taken me a couple of months to actually get around to making this myself but I’m happy to report that it is everything I had hoped for. I kind of wish I had a tape of my reaction when she enlightened me – I’m sure it was priceless. (I wish I were kidding…I’m not.) When my brilliant friend Tara alerted me to the fact that, hello!, this recipe was freely available on Panera’s website I was puuuumped.

When I was pregnant with Caroline, my OB’s office was just down the road from a Panera and I strategically scheduled all of my appointments around lunchtime, mostly because of this stuff.

When Andrew was younger, I would order it for him because I knew he wouldn’t eat it all and I could play anchor eater. I think most people (at least those of us who are human) have a fast food item or two that we just really like.

Panera bread white mac and cheese recipe