Can be prepared without pasta to produce 3 cups of cheddar sauce.
This recipe requires two ingredients you'll probably need to mail-order, but they'll last for months once you have them.
I usually make the pasta first and then the cheese. It takes twice as long, but it saves me a pan to wash and I think the pasta benefits from drying out.
Heat 6 quarts water in a large pot and salt to taste until boiling. Cook macaroni until tender.
Meanwhile, heat butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat until melted. Whisk in flour and cheddar powder and heat, whisking constantly, until roux becomes smooth, liquefied, and fragrant (don't brown it). If you're using Anthony's, the color will change from neon orange to a paler color. Add buttermilk powder and whisk until combined.
Add milk to roux and whisk until glossy, steaming, and slightly thickened. Whisk in sodium citrate and 1/2 tsp salt. Add American cheese and whisk until melted. Add cheddar cheese and simmer until cheese is melted, whisking occasionally.
When macaroni is tender (past al dente), drain. Transfer cheese sauce to pasta pot, add pasta, and stir. Add whole milk to thin sauce if necessary.
Aren't I nice for putting this below the recipe.
This recipe is for people that never stopped loving Kraft boxed mac and cheese. Kraft, as you know, has no cheese in it that hasn't been sent through miles of machinery. And yet, it has a savory tanginess that no homemade recipe has ever been able to duplicate (until now).
The flavor we are after is the same snarkiness you get from eating a good sharp cheddar cheese. The problem with cheddar is that it doesn't behave very well when it melts. It doesn't really melt at all; it separates into clumpy knots of milk protein and a puddle of grease. This comes out as a gritty, broken texture in the cheese sauce. If you don't need your cheese sauce to taste like cheddar, you can sub in other cheeses that melt better (like Monterey Jack), but the flavor becomes milder. Processed cheeses like Velveeta avoid this problem entirely because they contain emulsifying salts, but they have their own texture issues (melted Velveeta is gluey and solidifies as it cools).
The old-fashioned way to make mac and cheese is based on Mornay sauce. That's what you get when you add cheese to bechamel sauce, which is what you get when you add milk to a roux. Mornay sauce is wonderfully rich and smooth but when you make it with cheddar for mac and cheese, you end up with the gritty melted cheddar texture. Cook's Illustrated's classic mac and cheese recipe uses this technique with a blend of cheddar and monterey jack, but the flavor isn't that great and the roux and cheddar still make for a gritty sauce.
Other mac and cheese recipes might use something other than a roux for thickener, but they still typically solve the grittiness problem by scaling back on cheddar (or eliminating it) and using some other softer cheese (like ricotta, cottage cheese). The result is always the same: it may taste more real and substantial than Kraft, but it doesn't taste like cheddar cheese.
If we can't make the sauce taste like cheddar, can we include some other ingredient to fill in the gaps? Many baked casserole-style recipes include ground mustard, garlic powder, or other seasonings. Maybe that's what grandma's mac and cheese has tasted like since the 1930's, but I can always pick them out and they don't taste right to me. It's all about the cheddar.
A handful of modern cooks have turned to science to solve the cheddar problem. What we want is emulsification: a way to force the protein and oil components of the cheddar cheese to stay together in our sauce. Several newer recipes use evaporated milk, which has an emulsifying effect from its high protein content. Some recipes use egg yolks, which have lecithin, a natural emulsifier. Evaporated milk tastes like it comes out of a can, because it does. Egg yolks are tricky to incorporate without curdling (I wasn't successful).
The most promising method doesn't sound that appetizing but man is it cool. I first heard about sodium citrate from Daniel Gritzer's Modern Baked Mac and Cheese recipe. Sodium citrate is an emulsifying salt; add some to any melting cheese and you basically end up with homemade Velveeta. My problem with Gritzer's recipe is that a sauce that consists of water, cheese, and sodium citrate isn't that much different than melted Velveeta. It tastes better, but has the same gluey texture.
The final component in this abomination is me messing with the Kraft box formula. You're supposed to just mix the butter, milk, and cheese mix into the hot pasta. But I found that the cheese mix does some interesting things if you let it cook in hot butter for a minute - it gets this deep baked cheese flavor, like a Cheez-it cracker.
So Kraft box mac and cheese sucks in every way, except that no other recipe can touch it on pure cheddar flavor. Why? Powdered cheddar cheese. So we start there. We know that we can intensify it by cooking it with butter. If we add some flour, we've got a roux that we can make a sauce out of. With milk we have a Bechamel that has a headstart on cheese flavor and is also less gritty.
We can bring this "cheddaroux" technique back to the traditional mac and cheese recipe, but our goal is to maximize cheddar flavor, so we have to use as much cheddar cheese as we can. With just a little sodium citrate, we can solve the texture problem, but it's still a Bechamel underneath so there's no glueyness.
The final product is simply cheddar cheese in sauce form. No off-flavors, perfectly smooth, but tons of cheddar flavor. The sauce is so good it can be used on tons of things - burgers, baked potatoes, hot dogs - and that's before you start modifying the recipe, which is easy to do. I usually make double and save the rest for other food.