Bubbling Along

A little challenge was what I wanted. Penne pasta al forno with wild mushrooms and cheese sounds all sophisticated but it's really just a fancy version of macaroni cheese, I thought to myself. The recipe had a much longer list of ingredients than the one-pot recipes that eased me into cooking. No big deal. The method, albeit with pictures for each step, was a lot more complicated. Scalding milk, what's the big deal! Grating cheese, grinding bread, …, slicing mushrooms and onions – not my favorite thing in the world as mentioned in my first post, stir-frying, cooking flour in butter, ... Certainly not the one-pot recipes I was used to. Toto, we're not in Kansas any more!

Before long, I started getting cold feet. It seemed daunting. Don't we all prefer staying in our comfort zone when it comes to challenges that aren't exactly our passion? Perhaps, that's what people misinterpret as laziness in others – fear! Some of us have fear of complexity, fear of arduousness, fear of embarrassment that follows failure, or in my case, the fear of lumps in my white sauce! Not to mention the cheese turning into strings of curds. For my love of creamy sauces, I actually attempted making white sauce a long time ago. Unfortunately, the recipe back then had abysmal instructions like “add flour to the butter and cook for a while, then slowly add milk”, giving no clue to what is “a while” or the temperature setting for the hob. Yes, always blame the recipe, not yourself (hahaha!) As you can imagine, it all turned into custard, and it's not the type you would want to eat. But! Perseverance is a virtue.

Certain amount of faith is required to achieve success, for anybody, in anything. This is a new recipe after all. I measured out the cheese and grated it. I pulsed the slices of bread in the food processor to make the breadcrumbs and mixed in the specified amount of grated cheese with a snip of chives. I scalded the milk with a bay leaf and a slice of onion. I put on a pot of boiling water and cooked the pasta, sliced the mushrooms and onions, stir-fried them, and proceeded to make the béchamel sauce with the liter of scalded milk and 2 tablespoons of flour. Wait, what? 2 tablespoons of flour to 1 liter of milk? Faith, remember? Faith!

One more look at the recipe had me discover that only two-third of the milk is initially used, before adding the cheese. The rest of the milk was to be added after the cheese sauce was formed. Still, 2 tablespoons of flour to over 2 cups of milk didn't seem quite enough. The instructions said to first heat the sauce until it boils and thickens and then add the cheese. Being inexperienced takes so much longer to do things than it would for a master chef on TV. The milk was cold by the time I reached this stage in the recipe. Cold milk takes a while to boil, and a lot of cold milk takes a lot longer. Tick-tock, tick-tock, ...

Two sore feet and nearly an hour later, I had a cold pasta in lukewarm, not so much a sauce as, a cheese liquid, finally ready to be put in the oven. But nearly there; it is the home stretch. I was so excited and anxious that I kept looking through the oven window to see if the topping was browning and the pasta starting to bubble. Well, I wasn't watching a pot boil. :p Thirty minutes later, as promised by the recipe, it was golden and bubbling around the edges. It tasted great too! The cheese liquid had magically transformed into a beautifully gooey cheese sauce. Yay!

Three weeks passed, I tried the recipe again. <&*#@!> Please excuse the special characters. Everything turned into custard again. I followed the recipe the same way, and the only difference was that I managed to work faster with a little more experience and higher confidence, and I didn't watch the baking. The assembled dish was still warm before turning into the oven. This time the fancy mac 'n' cheese turned into baked mushy pasta with dry cheese strings. What is the conclusion? The recipe must have anticipated a cold assembled dish, for the cheese to not be overheated and the pasta not overcooked. Why didn't it just say so?! I couldn't give up now, having tasted success before. And, perseverance paid off. Now, I've learned to gauge the state of my cheese sauce against the recipe's cooking time. When the dish just starts to bubble around the edges, it has already reached the temperature for the cheese sauce to thicken, regardless of how little baking time has elapsed. If the dish is not browned enough by then, switching from bake to grill still can overheat the dish. A pale look is better than a horrid inside, in my opinion. Perhaps, I should try a chef's blow torch one day.