Hello, and welcome to my brand new mac and cheese review blog! Each week, I will be reviewing a different brand of mac and cheese that you can get here at Penn State, whether it be microwavable, from a restaurant, or even from the commons. Since mac and cheese was on Redifer Commons’ lunch menu today, I’ve decided to make this first post about that. To clarify, I’m talking about the mac and cheese that shows up on the buffet menu about once a week, not the mac and cheese that you can order every day from Redifer City Grill, though I will probably review that in a later post.

The Redifer Buffet mac and cheese is baked like a casserole. On the buffet line, it sat in its brushed steel serving dish, glistening under the incandescent yellow lighting. The top layer of macaroni was browned and crispy, but as I scooped into it with the serving spoon the soft and gooey under-layers were revealed. When I plopped my portion onto my plate, the melted cheese continued to cling to the noodles. This was a good sign. When the cheese is too watery, it will sometimes form a puddle on the plate, but that wasn’t happening here.

The cheese was a very pale yellow color, much lighter than the classic sharp yellow-orange of a box of Kraft. The noodles appeared to be longer and curlier than normal macaroni. I’d guess it was actually cavatappi, but that’s really all semantics. What truly matters is how it tastes.

The noodles were soft and buttery. The cheese was present, but not overpowering. I detected a hint of black pepper, which added a slight kick that enhanced the other flavors. The crispy bits didn’t come with any sort of burnt flavor. Rather, they were crunchy, adding a little texture to an otherwise overwhelmingly goopy dish. I cleaned my plate surprisingly quickly, which is usually a sign that the food is really good (maybe I should time how long it takes me to eat the mac and cheese for future posts to use as a metric of how much I enjoyed it).

I haven’t written a food blog before, but I think it would be fun to give each of the mac and cheeses I try a rating out of ten, that way they can be ranked. In that case, I’ll give the Redifer Buffet mac and cheese a 7/10. I have always said that Redifer has the best food out of any of the commons, and this is no exception. The flavors, textures, and overall experience of the dish were fantastic and really worked well together, culminating in a restaurant-quality meal, which is quite a rare find at the commons. If anything could be improved, I think the cheese could honestly be a little stronger. It wasn’t so weak that you couldn’t taste it, but the buttered noodle flavor was almost as prevalent as the cheese, which is not ideal. Overall, it was excellent mac and cheese. I would eat it again, though it could have been cheesier.