Amy Riolo: Hi! I am Chef Amy Riolo for the Association for Dressings and Sauces and today we are making Classic Macaroni and Cheese. This recipe serves six. So I've just preheated my oven to 400 degrees and now, I am going to start making my bchamel sauce. And bchamel is really the key to any great Macaroni and Cheese, it's a wonderful base. It's a French sauce, but it's common in a lot of really traditional American ingredients.

So we are going to start out we'll add one quarter cup butter and I am going to go ahead and melt this. So now my butter is melted and boiling and I am going to add my three tablespoons all purpose flour. This butter flour mixture is called a room. The minute it starts to turn brown, we are going to add our milk and our milk will thicken right up into a nice smooth bchamel sauce.

So now that my flour has completed incorporated, I am going to start adding the milk very slowly, two cups milk, it's amazing to see how quick the sauce thickens up. So now that I've added all of my milk, I am going to start whisking the ingredients together.

So now we can see our sauce has really thickened up nicely. We can add our clean cheese into the bchamel, one eight ounce packaged cream cheese. This is going to give us even a nicer creamy texture. I am just adding a little bit at a time, so that I can whisk it in and incorporate it. Once all of my cream cheese has mixed in and the sauce is nice and smoothed, I am going to go ahead and add my salt and pepper, one half teaspoon salt, one half teaspoon black pepper.

So now I am going to add in my two teaspoons Dijon mustard and the mustard is really a secret ingredient, because it gives a lot of nice great flavor and kick to our macaroni and cheese. It also gives it a really nice color. And mustard is also a favorite condiment among hotdog eaters. Now 85% of the people who eat hotdogs enjoy mustard, as their favorite topping.

And the last thing I am going to whisk in is the two cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese. The sauce in this case is already nice and thick; if it wasn't you could let it cook for a minute or too longer, but I am just letting it heat up so that all of our cheese really melts nicely.

So now that our sauce is finished, we can go ahead and add our cooked macaroni into the sauce, one half pound Elbow Macaroni, boiled in a large pot of salted water until al dente drained well. We'll just stir everything together. It would be delicious just like this before we even bake it, but I am just stirring everything together to make sure that this is coated well.

So now I am going to pour this right into my baking dish and you can use any two quart baking dish that you like. We'll just spread it evenly on top, it almost looks like a cake it's so pretty. So now I am going to make the topping. This is a really simple topping. We have two tablespoons butter and I am going to mix that with two tablespoons, chopped fresh parsley, one cup dry breadcrumbs. When this bakes, the breadcrumbs are going to get nice and golden and the butter is really going to break down and help to caramelize the top of the macaroni and cheese.

So now I am going to go ahead and just scatter this on top. We are going to put it on the oven and bake it for 20-25 minutes or until the top is golden and it's cooked solid.

So here is our classic macaroni and cheese. Remember that sauces and dressings add great flavor to your meals. For more creative recipes using mayonnaise, salad dressings, and other condiment sauces, visit dressings-sauces.

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