Pitting Heston’s silky smooth Macaroni Cheese recipe against the Hawksmoor Macaroni Cheese recipe, as gutsy as everything else at the London Steakhouse.
See this:
It’s a portion of Macaroni Cheese at Hawksmoor Seven Dials. Ordered when me and my mates went for our annual gourmet meal during Frightfest (i.e. we take a break from the horror films and I drag them to some pricey restaurant, then multiple trips to ChinChin Labs ). The year before we did the set menu at Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental.
We bloody love Hawksmoor, a restaurant full of gorgeous, hearty things that you want to eat. Their food is a lot of fun and their set menu is incredibly good value too. You should go.
Heston likes Hawksmoor too, having written a foreword full of glowing praise for their recipe book Hawksmoor at Home.
We love our copy, and some of the recipes in that book are remarkably similar to Heston’s own (triple cooked chips are wholesale copies – with the addition of beef dripping). Elsewhere in the book Hawksmoor favour traditional methods more akin to, say, St John (lots of bone marrow). The Hawksmoor macaroni chesse recipe is the latter.
We went through a hell of a lot of macaroni cheese last year, trying the Heston Waitrose Ready Meals, and testing out the Heston at Home Cauliflower Macaroni Cheese recipe. Now that we’re well into the New Year, (and now I’ve also given up on the diet), it’s safe to make another double portion of this magnificent comfort dish.
We’re pitting Hawksmoor’s traditional roux-based recipe against one from last year’s TV series: the How To Cook Like Heston Macaroni Cheese recipe.
Recipes: Heston’s Macaroni Cheese Recipe on Channel 4.com, A version of Hawksmoor’s Macaroni Cheese recipe on the BBC Good Food Website (note: this is different to the recipe in the book)
Special Equipment: None
Special Ingredients: None
Time: 40 minutes each recipe
Cost: £8 – £10. Or more if you use good wine or artisan cheeses.
Serves: 4
Difficulty: Fairly Easy
It’s fun to see that both dishes max out the cheesiness, each using up to 4 different sorts. And nice they both celebrate British produce. Though you’ll be hard pushed to get the very specific cheeses they recommend.
To make this more accessible we’re swapping the recommended varieties of Ogleshield, Montgommery Cheddar, Colston Basset, Berkswell and Spenwood for the supermarket-friendly advised alternatives. So: Gruyere, Cheddar, Stilton and Parmigiano Reggiano respectively.
Also, since we’re not wasteful lunatics, so we won’t be serving Heston’s Macaroni Cheese recipe in a purposefully hollowed out wheel of cheese.
Oh, and we like breadcrumbs atop our macaroni cheese, for added texture. They’re not in either recipe, but we’re putting them on anyway. Tough.
REPORT
Hawksmoor Macaroni Cheese Recipe
While you put the pasta on to boil you can get on with the first part of this recipe: grating the cheese. Quite a lot of cheese, in fact: The Hawksmoor macaroni cheese recipe calls for half a kilo. Here’s the leftover rinds after their epic battle with the grater:
I made the mistake of grating all of the cheese together at the start. Ideally you’re meant to reserve half of the cheddar for topping. We just weighed out 125g of the mixed cheese instead. It wasn’t fatal.
Next you’ll need to make a roux using butter and flour, then add pre-boiled milk. Hawksmoor’s measurements will give this a really stodgy, thick consistency.
To this add your cheese in stages. The resulting sauce is absolutely delicious, try not to eat too much of it as you “add nutmeg and seasonings to taste”.
If all this sounds quite simple it didn’t feel it. The multiple bits of weighing and juggling three pans and several measuring and mixing bowls took far longer than we expected.
After all that just tip all the sauce onto the pasta, top it with cheese and bung the whole enterprise in the oven for 30-ish minutes.
Which is barely enough time to take care of the rival recipe…
Heston’s Macaroni Cheese Recipe
Meanwhile the Man From Bray starts off not with a roux and milk, but with chicken stock (?!?!) which has had some parmesan rind infused in it. We heard about this concept a while ago and have been stockpiling rinds ever since. Good to finally use them!
Heston’s recipe, to serve 4, only calls for a mere 200g of macaroni, compared to Hawksmoors 500g.
Now, granted, we’re eating both recipes – so making enough to feed 8 might already be a foolish idea- but for balance we doubled Heston’s quantities. (Also useful since we were able to stockpile some in the freezer for future testing against the Modernist Cuisine Macaroni Cheese recipe).
You might be able to make out one of those rinds there infusing into our Marco Pierre White recipe stock (no way were we making Heston’s 3 hour brown chicken stock just for this!). Knorr stock is horrendously high in salt, so we had to leave out the salt added to the pasta to compensate. And so that the finished dish would be edible!
While this is going on it’s a good time to start reducing the white wine over a high heat. In the largest pan possible, because it’ll take a while.
It’s also a good time to cook the pasta in a shallow pan of water. More like cooking rice, this 2:1 water—to-pasta ratio is to prevent the loss of starches, which will help thicken the final cheese sauce…
… which is probably necessary since there’s not an awful lot of cheese or (corn) flour to do the job. A mere 160g of parmesan compared to Hawksmoor’s half a kilo. Here’s how the two portions compare side-by-side:
The recipe instructions don’t specify the next step (although the TV show does), but you ideally want to ensure every grain of the grated parmesan cheese is well coated in the cornflour. It will feel like much longer, but a good 60 seconds or more of mixing by hand seems to do the trick.
Oh, and for extra cheesiness there’s this offensively small quantity of goats cheese. The recipe calls for just ten grammes. TEN GRAMMES! Try buying that at the cheese counter.
The cheapo goat’s cheese we bought didn’t “cube” very well, like Heston wants it to. I had to resort to freezing it then carving off clumsy flakes.
Meanwhile don’t forget to check on your pasta, which will need regular stirring and shaking to ensure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan – a serious danger when so little water is present. Also remember to toss that macaroni in truffle oil after draining, to prevent it sticking.
After all this palaver you can tip the reduced-wine into the infused-stock, then stir in the flour-coated-cheese until it’s melted, before adding an additional quantity of cream cheese. I guess you could use mascarpone to make this even richer, but we settled for some own-brand Philadelphia stuff.
Finally, finally, you can add the sauce to the pasta, top with goats cheese and finish the whole thing off under the grill in a couple of minutes. Which at least means there’s no half hour wait while the thing bakes in the oven.
VERDICT
Heston’s Macaroni Cheese recipe gives you a creamier, lighter, more refined dish. Wonderfully savoury too, thanks to that wine and stock base.
Hawksmoor’s recipe is a much stodgier and brutish thing, in keeping with the masculine character of their restaurants.
Texture-wise Heston is the winner. Hawksmoor’s Macaroni Cheese recipe is flour-heavy and every bite has a powdery mouthfeel as a result. After trying Heston’s silky smooth Macaroni Cheese recipe it’s like rubbing sandpaper on your tongue.
However, the cheese-onslaught of the Hawksmoor recipe was the overall winner on flavour. Our taste panel of 4 people all preferred it’s winning combination of punchy flavours. In the words of one tester: “It tastes how Macaroni Cheese ought to taste.”
They’re both far more work than we expected. Hawksmoor’s demands a lot of weighing and grating, while Heston’s wants a lot of infusing and reducing before you can start. Both juggle 3 pans and multiple trips to the digital scales.
They’re both also more expensive to make than you’d imagine Macaroni Cheese ought to be. But then what do you expect from either Heston or Hawksmoor?
Have a look at both portions served up for dinner. Hawksmoor’s Macaroni cheese recipe is in the foreground, coated with it’s clearly thicker sauce.
There’s no denying that the Hawksmoor recipe is far too floury to be perfect. That texture really is a noticeable distraction after the luxury of Heston’s Macaroni Cheese recipe. But we all preferred Hawksmoor’s flavour. Result? It’s a draw!
NEXT TIME
Oh, we’re far from done with Macaroni Cheese recipes. So by no means is this the place to make a final judgement on future technique.
Some of the Heston macaroni cheese recipe has been frozen to be pitched against the next contender: Modernist Cuisine. I have a hunch their Sodium Citrate-based Modernist Cuisine Macaroni Cheese recipe might strike the perfect balance between these two dishes, allowing us to get the smoothness of Heston’s recipe and the flavour of Hawksmoor.
Watch this space.
Further Reading
BigSpud – Is there anything Gary doesn’t beat us to first? Brilliant and informative post from our absolute favourite blogger. Essential reading, as always.
Have you made either of these recipes, or have you got a favourite macaroni cheese recipe of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.
I like creamier lighter textures but strong on cheese taste, so I think Heston’s would suit me better of the two!
Great experiment!
Hey Kavey! 🙂
Did you check out the link to Modernist Cuisine? I think this might be future winner. We’ll be trying it with their recommendation of cheddar, but I reckon the cheese mix from the Hawksmoor recipe would work a treat. That might give the perfect balance of smooth texture and flavour. And without the cauliflower puree I hope it won’t end up sitting like a brick in the stomach, the way Heston’s Cauliflower Macaroni Cheese recipe did.
Then again, I’m wondering if one of us might just try adding the Hawksmoor cheeses to Heston’s stock and wine mix and seeing what happens?
Very interesting read! My family are big fans of macaroni cheese – I will have to try this. I had a half-hearted attempt a while ago from memory of the tv program, which was a disaster of separating stock & cheese mess. I really must give it a go properly.
The Heston one really does taste quite smooth and luxurious.
Ignore my moaning at the end, if you’re not cooking two at once they’re fairly simple. And if you use a stock pot / cube you can literally just let it sit while you reduce the wine. The main things to watch for are stopping the pasta from sticking in the pan and making sure the cheese is really well coated in cornflour. It geuinely does take a long time to toss the flour through the cheese until it’s well coated, and that seems to be the essential part.
Gary did a brilliant write up of this over on BigSpud. It’s well worth checking out
Thanks for the mention Phil. You’ve reminded me to make this again!
Hi Phil,
Not a comment on this article as such (although I will be trying Heston’s version soon, for sure; my wife loves mac & cheese). It’s more that I wanted to say I just discovered your blog, read a few posts, and really enjoyed them. I enjoy your writing style and look forward to further browsing of your archives later.
Regards,
Rich (food blogger at objection-salad.com)
Hi Rich!
Thanks for reading 🙂 Great blog and stunning photography you have there. Have already bookmarked it.
I’ve just tried out Modernist Cuisine’s recipe for Mac n Cheese (hoping not to take months to post it this time) and I’m hoping we might be able to combine it, the Hawksmoor and Heston recipes to create what would be genuinely the Perfect Macaroni Cheese recipe.
Hi- just discovered your blog and its become my fave. Love the concept, the blatant I-live-in-your-average-town shopping compromises, and your writing style is both humorous and serious. Love it! Also, the comments you get from others deserve a mention: 5 or 6 enjoyable bits of friendly, lighthearted encouragement per post…Wot no rapid descent into sweary name calling??! Unheard of!
Hugely appreicate the kind comments Soraya. Hope you’ll cntinue to enjoy our clumsy bungling through the perfection recipes. I will put our success down to the high-quality of the other readers / commenters. I guess we all have to be an open-minded bunch to enjoy the food of a chef who gives the world Sardine-on-toast sorbet! 🙂
I swear by the Heston recipe but a friend bought me the Hawksmoor at Home book so I thought I’d give their version a go.
I have to say, the Heston version wins hands down!
The white wine and chicken stock make Heston’s much more flavoursome, and the cream cheese makes the sauce extra smooth and tasty. In contrast, despite putting half a kilo of cheese into the Hawksmoor one – including a strong Stilton – it ended up bizarrely rather bland.
Also, I know a roux is the traditional method of making M&C, but the flour just made the Hawksmoor version rather stodgy and cloying.
As an aside, the Hawksmoor version also doesn’t stand up to re-heating! As I write this, I have just forced down a re-heated clump of it for lunch.
Heston wins!
Hi Mike!
Thanks for taking the time to read and to comment.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. We think that the stodginess of the Hawksmoor recipe really ruins the result.
We’ve gone on to try the Modernist Cuisine recipe and it offers the best of both worlds. Loads of flavour AND the smoothest imaginable sauce. Not only that, the recipe can be ready in about 15 minutes.
Have a read and tell us what you think: http://www.insearchofheston.com/2013/05/heston-v-modernist-cuisine-macaroni-cheese/
Sounds like you put too much flour in the Hawksmoor recipe.
Hi Jon,
I think you may well be right. That or we used the wrong kind. If I’m honest I was too lazy to sieve it as well!