In my mind, Kraft mac and cheese is the standard for all of mac and cheese. It is to mac and cheese as vanilla is to ice cream. It is mac and cheese with default settings. So, naturally, I thought it would be fitting to write the second of my mac and cheese reviews on Kraft, to set a sort of baseline before I get into more exotic interpretations of the dish (yes, those are coming).
One of the things I love about Kraft mac and cheese is its versatility. Since it is the default, as I just described, there is plenty of room for amateur chefs to experiment and improve upon it. Just a few weeks ago, I had some of the best mac and cheese of my life at a friend’s apartment, where she simply added some Mexican-blend shredded cheese to a pot of Kraft. A different friend once told me about a time he started making a pot of Kraft before realizing that he was out of butter. He decided to use this jalepeno cream cheese he had on hand as a substitute, and the end result was supposedly good enough to make him accidentally achieve Nirvana (I haven’t tried his recipe yet, but it’s on my to-do list). However, my review today will not be about some restaurant-worthy Kraft variation I stumbled upon. I will be reviewing the pure, unaltered, straight-out-of-the-box Kraft.
Well, actually, I don’t have a pot or a colander, so I’m reviewing the microwaveable bowl version. Right off the bat, I was surprised by how easy and quick it was to make. Usually with a box of Kraft, you have to wait ten minutes or so to boil some water, and then another eight minutes to cook the noodles. Instead, all I had to do was fill the bowl with water, put it in the microwave for three and a half minutes, and then stir in the cheese powder. After a few minutes of stirring, I had something that loosely resembled the picture on the box! Very loosely, in fact. The cheese was not nearly as thick or sumptuous-looking, and you could still see the dull gray color of the noodles through it.
When it comes to food, though, appearances are always secondary to flavor. I sat at my desk in my dorm room, and raised the plastic fork to my mouth. The noodles were very soft. The cheese was excessively goopy, and had a decently strong flavor. However, I still found myself thinking that the cheese to noodle ratio was a little low. That is, the cheese could have been even stronger, and the dish would have benefitted. All in all, though, it tasted like Kraft. The cheese had that trademark slightly fake flavor, like a weird cross between American and cheddar.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and it filled my stomach, but I definitely prefer a bowl of the original, make-it-in-a-pot Kraft mac and cheese. However, the disparity between the two is so small that the convenience of being able to make this kind in the microwave would probably outweigh the difference in flavor in some situations. This was a very adequate and mediocre bowl of mac and cheese, and for that it earns the rank of C on my tier-list (now posted on my homepage!).
The tier list on your home page was an elite addition to your blog, I like it a lot. It will be useful and enlightening to see where each brand stands relative to the previously ranked ones. Throughout my life, I’ve had somewhat of a personal vendetta against microwaving foods that could/should be made in other ways (e.g., toaster oven for leftover pizza, stove top for leftover soup; microwaved is just always worse). But, being in college, desperate times call for desperate measures. I agree that the pot-Kraft is definitely better, but the microwaveable-Kraft is an adequate alternative if you don’t have a stove. When it comes to microwaveable mac n’ cheese, I like Panera’s the best (it comes with liquid cheese already inside instead of the water & packet method, and the cheese is whiter that the yellow/orange Kraft color).
I really like the descriptions in the build up and during your reviews and it creates strong senses of imagery for me to imagine what the food tastes like. Furthermore, I like how you are getting a wide range of Mac and cheese to review, from packaged to prepared. I also agree that the convenience of this Mac and Cheese is a massive factor in its rating. Also, I like the addition of the tier list on the home page, as it ranks them all clearly and allows us to recall the previous ratings and compare them. Well done.
Excited to see the tier list suggestion make an appearance, and I agree with everything you said in this post. Kraft is definitely the benchmark for mac and cheese, and microwavable Kraft is inferior to stovetop Kraft. I think it’s smart to review Kraft now so you can see that baseline on the tier list as you were discussing. I also really liked that you added some description to your blog post regarding the experience of eating the food. Nice work!