Want a homemade dinner but don’t want to be bothered to even dice an onion? Make this easy Stovetop Mac N Cheese! It’s quick and easy, taking well under 30 minutes to prepare. 

THE INGREDIENTS:

Butter: We create richness through using a good amount of butter in this dish. Melted butter is also a key ingredient in a roux-which allows our mac n cheese to be thickened. 

Dried Minced Onion: Without chopping an onion, this seasoning adds a strong onion flavor to our mac n cheese! 

Flour: The other key ingredient in a roux, flour is the ingredient to thank for the thickness of the cheese sauce. 

Freshly Cracked Black Pepper: Easily replaced with regular black pepper, freshly cracked black pepper is often stronger and can cut through the extreme richness of the cheese sauce well. Everyone has a different pepper tolerance, so go with what you like! If you don’t know how much pepper you can handle, ½ tsp is always a good starting place. 

Garlic Powder: Garlic pairs well with an oniony flavor, which we introduced through the dried minced onion. 

Lawry Salt: Lawry Salt is not just a brand, but it is a salt with other seasonings added. We find it goes well with potato or cheese-focused dishes. Don’t have Lawry salt? Make your own by combining salt, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, and turmeric. Going heavy handed with spices can be a good thing, but we’ve learned to be careful with turmeric.

Dried Parsley: Fresh flavor doesn’t need to be added to everything, especially comforting mac n cheese. Dried parsley has little to no flavor, but it adds the visual finishing touch! Seeing the specs of herbs in your mac n cheese helps you to eat with your eyes first-and it looks delicious! If you don’t have it, feel free to skip it. 

Red Pepper Flakes: This mac n cheese is nowhere near spicy, but adding this small amount of red pepper flakes helps, just like the black pepper does, to have you taste more than just a mountain of cheese. It adds a zing to the dish that even those with no spice tolerance won’t be troubled by. 

Mustard Powder: This spice adds a richness to the cheese sauce, but be careful! Adding too much mustard powder gives an incredibly strong, tongue-coating bitter flavor. The key to only having ½ tsp in this recipe is that mustard is an incredible background flavor, we just do not want to bring it to the limelight. 

Milk: We use 2% milk in this recipe, but whatever you have on hand will work fine! For a general rule of thumb, if you use whole milk, your mac n cheese will have a thicker sauce. If you use 1% or skim milk, your mac n cheese will have a thinner sauce. Adding or taking away some of the milk is the secret to get your personal desired consistency. When we divide and add the milk at 2 different points, we stop it from getting too thick. We can thicken the roux and milk mixture by heating it together-the more we wait, the thicker it will get. Since we are adding some of the milk right at the end, we don’t have to worry about enough time passing to make our sauce thicker than we actually want, compared to if we added everything at the same thing.

Shredded Cheddar: Sharp, mild-you name it! Any kind of cheddar belongs in this recipe. We use shredded cheddar because it is not a 25 minute dinner if you have to shred it yourself. We want this recipe to be easy for nights where you just don’t have the time for an hour or more in the kitchen. This means we have to minimize the dishes we would have used too, and washing a cheese grater sounds too stressful for what should be a quick ‘n’ easy night! 

Smoked Gouda: If we want this dinner to be quick, why do we make you cut the cheese (the gouda cheese)? Unlike the cheddar, the gouda in this recipe is a small amount, so it does not too much time. Without getting out any meat, smoked gouda cheese provides an excellent smokiness so you won’t miss the lack of meat in this dish. It also adds more cheese, which sounds like a great idea for mac n CHEESE. 

Elbow Pasta: This is the classic pasta for mac n cheese, and we did not want to deviate from it! 

Breadcrumbs: Mac n cheese tends to have the same texture throughout the entire dish. This may seem fine, but the more you eat it you may start to feel bored. Breadcrumbs fix that! You still get plenty of gooey bites, but the occasional crisp breadcrumb adds nice texture to the dish. Their small size also makes them very easy to eat. 

Italian Seasoning: If you don’t want to add seasoning, you can buy pre-seasoned breadcrumbs. Italian seasoning adds a nice flavor to your breadcrumbs so that they are useful for taste and texture. 

Optional Toppings: Personally, we like to add green onions to the mac n cheese. Our photo has about 3 green onions’ worth of green onions. However, you can also add extra cheese or some fresh vegetables, like broccoli or cauliflower, on top. 

KEY INFORMATION:

Roux and Sauce Thickness: A traditional roux is equal parts fat and flour. To get our mac n cheese thicker, we need to have it on the heat for more time to give the roux a chance to thicken the whole dish as much as we want. However, if we find our mac n cheese to be too thick, the way to go is adding a little extra milk. If you don’t have the time to wait to heat and thicken the mac n cheese, we recommend adding a bit more flour-1 or 2 more tablespoons-when making the roux. You may have to add in more milk at the end, but it will at least get thicker faster! 

Unsalted or Salted Butter? Any kind of butter works for this recipe. If you are nervous about the salt content and are using salted butter, you can reduce the Lawry salt by ¼ tsp. However, we feel as if the type of the butter does not really affect this mac n cheese dish since it is not delicate and there is a lot of fat to cancel out saltiness. 

Parchment Paper and Breadcrumbs: If you are using foil or a dark baking pan, you might want to reduce the time that the breadcrumbs cook. The parchment paper leads to less uneven browning on the bottom and makes for an easier clean-up.