macaroni cheese frozen??? batch cooking

karren

As I'm looking for variations on the batch cooking front,
Can you freeze macaroni cheese???

I make own white sauce so I thought I could batch cook this and freeze, but not sure if the macaroni will be ok???

And if anyone has good ideas I'd be grateful x

Callie22

I freeze it. I think it's best though if you slightly undercook the pasta and if you make it slightly more saucy than normal, as the freezing seems to dry it out a bit.

wondercollie

You might undercook the past a little.

The shops sell enough of these meals, so it's not impossible.

Eenymeeny

Interesting question thanks OP. Can I ask the best way to reheat this please?
Would you defrost slowly then warm up in a pan or microwave? Just thinking that it would make the teatime kitchen a lot less messy!
Thanks

Savannah02K

I tend to just freeze the cheese sauce component, make big batch then freeze individual portions. I like to add frozen veggies to my macaroni so cook those in same pot as the pasta, drain and put on my one side then tip the defrosted cheese sauce into the now empty pan, heat it, pour the veggies and mac in, stir it up, put in pasta dish and pop that under grill.

I find doing cheese sauce separately also means I can use it for other stuff, fish, chicken, whatever. Just gives bit more variety rather than having half dozen of same things in the freezer.

Linda32

Hi, I've done this lots of times. Cook the pasta and cheese sauce seperately in the first instance. I've made my own cheese sauce and used the Bisto version, both work fine.

At the same time fry some bacon for some added flavour.

Then when all cooked I snip the bacon with scissors into the cheese sauce (hope this makes sense).
Mix in the pasta and portion into sandwich boxes which I used for freezing.

To defrost, I put in the fridge the night before the tea time that I want it.

Decant into an oven proof dish. At this point it really dosn't look very nice but bear with me. If you add grated cheese on top it seems to make the sauce again IYSWIM. I then re-heat at gas mark 6 for 30 minutes. I hardly ever re-heat in the microwave as I'm old fashioned and prefer the oven, but because of this I've not got much experience of doing so.

I think in this case you need the cheese to melt rather than be blasted with heat.


HTH

vikki_louise

We have it as one of our 'microwave meals' (batch cooked then frozen), freezes fine and heats up perfectly, you don't get the crispy melted cheese on top like you do when you have stuck it under the grill but I like it

Eenymeeny

Thank you, lots of good ideas here. I can see that one of OH's favourites is going to be added to the teatime menu

FairyPrincessk

I'm curious about this--I've never tried freezing macaroni and cheese, primarily because I don't want to make it any easier than it is to eat it;) However, I also haven't tried it because when re-heating leftovers, I notice that the cheese sauce tends to go a bit lumpy. I've also noticed that this happens if I make mac and cheese and then bake it--does anyone know what causes this? I must admit that I have experimented with all sorts of mac and cheese recipes to perfect them and this is the one thing I can't seem to sort out. It isn't usually a problem though, because it isn't like there are ever any leftovers:D

Is it a fat problem? I tend to use semi-skimmed milk, real butter, and some sort of lower to middle of the range cheese like the 1.89 selection at Aldi. Red Leicester is one of my favourites. The reason I ask is when I first started making alfredo sauce, I had similar lumps and found that increasing the fat--either by using cream or a higher fat content milk or more butter helped the cheese to blend in more smoothly.

karren

thanks for replies i havent had chance yet to make it but off this week and stressed so can feel a bakethon coming up as its a huge time saver and money saver as less tempted to order takeaway!
i never thought of popping bacon or ham in but shall.
as ever all thanks x

maryb

I have one of those rectangular Pyrex dishes with a lid and I use it all the time for macaroni cheese so I can make one freeze one.I have found it doesn't matter how liquid you make the sauce when preparing it always seems to dry out when frozen So what I do is to defrost it before you put it in the oven then pour in more milk round the edges so it comes about 1/3 of the way up the dish (easy to see with Pyrex) and jiggle a knife in a few places to make the milk spread evenly. It gets absorbed in reheating and turns out perfectly