Oh ya? Well go roux yourself!

The Cal v. Ohio St. game happens in less than a week.  I think there are stories from our trip to Columbus in 2012 that are ripe for sharing.  In fact I may need someone to help guest write that entry for me because there was a lot to talk about.  Today, though we focus on an event that we have made a tradition over the last few years... Tailgate Test Kitchen.

*Unnecessary side note. Or as my friend Jenn would say...Catnip! Matthew Berry has not yet read the last blog entry (Mutton, Lettuce, Tomato, and Matthew Berry)...or if he did read it, he hated it and chose to spare my feelings and ignore me. I didn't think he would read it, mind you, but I'm disappointed anyway. Consider this now an obsession to have him at least read my one blog entry that is dedicated to him. Ok, moving on.*

At my daughter's 2nd birthday party, my PILs (Parents in Law...really just my MIL but I want to give them both credit since they work as a catering team most of the time) brought over a vat of mac & cheese.  How big, exactly is a vat? Bigger than will fit in a Tupperware,  but smaller than a barrell Heisenberg would use to bury his cash. 

Let's just say it's more than enough to serve a bunch of screaming kids, and have enough left over for their parents to go back multiple times, pretend to have another half scoop, but really take two scoops and eat one on the way back to the table so the other parents don't say to themselves..."How many grams of carbs is he going to eat today, Jane?!"

Let's be straight and to the point.  It was really good. No cracker crumbles, no 4 layers of fancy cheeses...just noodles, and pure orange gooey goodness.  Sous Chef, and soon to be contributer to this blog, DBo and I agreed without question.  Mac & Cheese was a perfect tailgate option, and needed to make an appearance this year.  And so it was said.

A few years ago we did chili test kitchen... as you can imagine many pots and beans and spoons and testing and tasting etc.  It was great.  Last year was schnitzel schliders.  Test kitchen is awesome. But it's more than just testing out recipes to see what tastes best.  We have to always think in terms of, how can we make something tasty, but do it on a gas grill...or if cooked ahead of time, how do we transport it...and if we have to make huge batches of it, how do we store it, or make the recipe work for larger volumes...oh, and will it fit in our budget of $20 per person which has to cover food, booze, water, soda, supplies etc.

So we sit around and watch football...GO NINERS! and we cook.  This year the plan was two fold. How do we improve on eggs for the bacon explosion breakfast sandwich, and getting the right recipe for mac & cheese.

The bacon explosion (or bacon armageddon as we make it) will take up an entire other blog post.  But for information's sake, here is a refresher course.  We copied it, and then improved it.
The Bacon Explosion

You may say to yourself, how do you take that awesome bacon log and improve upon it?  Or you may say, why would you possibly do anything to something that perfect besides eat it as is.  Here's the answer. Bacon explosion = awesome. Bacon explosion breakfast sandwich 2328 style is memorable... Sorta like how memorable a heart attack would be.

How many is that for you Todd?
That makes a baker's dozen for me.

Our version = Toasted english muffin, topped with sliced bacon explosion, melted cheddar cheese and a fried egg. It's as healthy as it sounds.  But let me ask you this, have you ever tried to make fried eggs for dozens of people on a gas grill with regular grates? It's not easy... haha. We started by just bringing a frying pan and doing it on the grill top.  That worked, but took forever.  After 2 years, I decided to try something new...poached.  It worked last year, but there could be improvements.  *As an aside. Great way to poach in advance...Bring water to near boil. Drop in an ounce or two of regular vinegar.  Crack egg and put in a ramekin or dish, and gently let the egg into the water. Cook for 3-4 minutes depending on how you like them, and remove.  You can keep these overnight stored in ice water...and to heat them up just dunk them in hot water and serve. The yolks, believe it or not, stay runny and the eggs taste great.*

But the poaching requires we have pots of hot water which are hard to arrange at a tailgate party, so I wanted a better way. Enter, the muffin tin, and a griddle top.

Seems too good to be true. But thanks to the Beauty and Bedlam blog I got some really good tips, and we have modified it just a bit for our tailgate purposes.  Tested it in the oven to start, but at test kitchen we wanted to see if it would work straight on the grill grates.

Start by getting a regular non stick muffin tin. For us we can't use silicone since we are putting it directly onto the grill.  Spray with regular cooking spray.  Gently crack an egg into the tin.  Uh, is it really this simple? Yes.

You can scramble the egg inside the tin, if you desire.

Place the tin directly on the grill and watch magic happen.  Ignore the bacon cups for a second, I'll get back to that.  After about 3-4 minutes the whites of the egg will start to get hard.  After about 7 minutes the outside whites of the egg should be hard enough that if you take a regular spatula, you should be able to pop them out of the tin like a little puck.  The goal for the sandwich is to have the yolks runny like a fried egg, but not have to actually fry the damn things individually. So how do we get there?

When the whites are still loose on the inside, pop them out and flip them onto the griddle grate.

Once the whites are solid enough to remove them, do it. Pop them out and flip them onto your griddle top...ours can be seen here.  Finish until they are done to your liking.  The yolks should remain nice and runny, which is the key to the fantastic-ness of the perfect breakfast sandwich.  As you can see, I scrambled some just for fun, and that works great...you can even add things to them if you want little mini breakfast scrambles.  If you want to know how to best store these puppies, read the blog I linked to above and they have some really important tips about what you need to do to store them or freeze them.  

Ok, onto the bacon and the mac.

Bacon is good, we know that. Bacon makes everything better, duh.  Except beer. NEVER, ever, buy or try to drink this Voodoo Bacon Ale.  It is disgusting, take my word for it.  We'll get to the mac&cheese in a second, but let's look at the bacon cups that we decided to try. After all, what could improve the breakfast sandwich more than adding another element of bacon to it?  So, the goal was simple. Let's make a cup made out of bacon.  It (sorta) works, but is probably more trouble and $ than it's worth.

We started by foiling a muffin tin, and wrapping 2.5 pieces of bacon into what you see below.  If you think about it, that's a lot of bacon per cup.  This was thick cut, it might work better, actually, with thin.  We then baked the bacon on the tin until we got it as crispy as we could.  Problem is that we couldn't get the inside crispy, either due to insufficient heat, or the fact that the foil was not giving us a good heat transfer.

Make sure you overlap the bottom several times, and allow room for shrinkage.

The result after baking.  Not inedible, but certainly not a great result aesthetically.

What you see above is how it came out.  Then, we popped them onto the grill next to the eggs and that seemed to finish them to a point of crispness that may not have been pretty, but it was functional enough for the end result you'll see at the end of this entry.

If you're interested, there is a more specific bacon cup device that you can buy, but we haven't pulled the trigger on it yet. Check it out at buybaconbasket.com. My favorite line is, "make a healthy egg white omelette in a bacon basket!" Haha...nothing makes egg whites healthier than a basket of bacon.

Mac & Cheese

BASIC RECIPE

4 Tbsp Butter

1/2 cup flour

1 1/2 lb. Velveeta Cheese

2 lb. bag "Large" Macaroni noodles

5 + cups whole milk

Point of emphasis. If you like fancy stuff, like cracker crumbles or gruyere and havarti cheeses...you're not alone. That stuff is delicious. I like mac & cheese in all its forms, and that gourmet stuff is incredible. THIS is not a gourmet recipe. I know there are fancier, but this tastes amazing and is super simple so don't give me crap because I used...you guessed it...VELVEETA!

The Noodles

Why in the world did I post a picture of the bag of noodles? It's just a noodle, right? WRONG!  The size of the noodle is super important.  Box mac and cheese has the small ones, and that stuff is yummy. But the sauce in that is much lighter and thinner, and can work with those noodles. The sauce for this recipe is thick and gooey, and if you use small macaroni it won't allow the sauce to properly coat the outside AND the inside of the noodles, which is really important. Trust me.  So just go to Safeway (the only brand I could find) and get the bag of LARGE Macaroni noodles.  I am guessing that shells would work fine, or even penne...but skip anything that is super small that doesn't have a big cavity for cheese input.

We used a single two pound bag to make two tins that you will see below.

Boil salted water and cook the noodles until they are done. You know when that is. If they are a tiny bit overcooked, that's better than under-cooked for our purposes.  But why not just cook them right to begin with? After all, like Jimmy Dugan says, "Anything worth doing is worth doing right!" (If you find a video link for that, please let me know.)

The Roux

Ok, Websters says I can spell it Rue too...do you really care? If you know what I'm talking about you are a sufficient enough chef to know how to spell it on your own.

Look in any cookbook, we're working with basics here. Equal parts fat and flour.  I used 4 Tbsp butter and about a 1/2 cup of flour. I'm not sure if that's equal parts or not, but it seemed to work ok.  Melt the butter, get the flour whisked in, and let it simmer until it gets a little brown.

Then, add warm milk slowly and whisk.  It's important, I'm told, that the milk is not cold. If you want to know why I'm sure the Joy of Cooking will explain. I've already gone on long enough in this entry.  I used about 5 cups of milk. I would say you can go with more.  You can use whatever milk you like, but Whole milk is going to give you the best taste and consistency, and that's what we used here.  Mix thoroughly and simmer.

The Cheese (product)

Get a 1 lb.block of Velveeta.  Then get another one and cut it in half.  Heck, Walmart will even sell it to you online and ship it to you if you are too ashamed to be seen at your local grocery store buying this fantastic cheese "product."  And if you are being snobby, let me tell you this, Velveeta was the first cheese product to get the American Medical Association's seal of approval. And if THEY say it's ok to eat, who are we to argue?

Take the 1.5 lbs and chop it, slice it, whatever, add it at low heat to the roux and watch it thicken up into amazing, amazing goodness.  I add a little pepper to taste, and that's it. Super simple.

The construction

It's important, as I said before, that you coat all of the noodles in cheese sauce. So do it in layers. Mix it around, and don't skimp. You may think when you put the noodles into the tin that the mixture is too runny. It's not. We're gonna bake it and it's going to get thicker, I promise.  And too much goo is a good thing, anyway.

Every oven is different. You can see the sizes of tins we used below. I suggest 350 degrees for about 30 minutes...and if you want to attempt to brown the top you can throw it up near the broiler for 5 minutes for color. For our purposes, I didn't bother.  You're just baking it so it thickens and reaches the desired consistency.  Take it out, and you're done.

The Bacon

As you notice, we added chopped bacon to one batch, and, as I said before, it makes everything except beer taste better. OMG this was phenomenal...*HINT* Replace butter with bacon fat for the bacon mac version.  Any fat should work, and just that little added flavor makes for a nice added touch.

The finished product. These two tins were polished off by 8 people, I kid you not. It's that good.

Taking it to new levels

So, you have eggs, you have bacon cups, and you have bacon mac & cheese. Yes, you know where this is going.  The bacon cup was made on the outside of the tin. The eggs, on the inside. Guess what that means...they fit! Insert egg into bacon cup.  Top with a layer of bacon mac...and here's what you get.

Hungry Yet?

About to be devoured.

And, ladies & gentlemen, I present you with your first, and not to be the last, picture of my Sous Chef, DBo, as he throws down a ceremonial bite of what was an extraordinarily great day of tailgate test kitchen.

Up next

tOSU comes to town on Saturday. We did some more prep this weekend and I'll update you with where we stand going into another edition of Beargating...as us Cal fans prepare to win...the party, that is.

Go Bears!

Words cannot describe it.