Baked macaroni and cheese offers a different experience from mac made on the stove. Instead of a creamy, gooey pot of pasta and cheese sauce, you get a mass of tender noodles held together by stretchy cheese strings, and crowned with a crispy, broiled topping. It’s that topping that makes baked mac so special.
Get a pan for your mac:
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If you prioritize crunchy browned bits over gooey innards, you might as well go all the way and maximize your ratio of exterior to interior. To best do this, ditch the deep casserole dish and get your sheet pan involved.
This brilliant trick comes from one of my favorite food sites, AllRecipes. Rather than bake the mac in a deeper vessel, they spread it out into an even layer in a rimmed baking sheet, so every bite is blessed with golden crunchiness:
The increased surface area when you spread the pasta and cheese sauce out on a baking pan means the pasta pieces combined with milk and cheese can be exposed to the heat of the oven in one even layer. This makes for a mac and cheese where every single bite will have that crispy edge experience.
There’s even a recipe you can follow, but you can apply this method to pretty much any macaroni, even this stovetop version. Once you’ve made your mac, all you have to do is spread it on a sheet pan in an even layer on a prepared baking sheet (line it with aluminum foil), then top with more cheese, bread crumbs, or any crunchy thing you desire, such as Cheetos. Drizzle with a tablespoon of melted butter, and bake in a 350-degree oven until the top is browned and bubbling, about 15 minutes. Serve hot and crispy.