The Best Vegan Mac and Cheese Ever!

Pasta

1. Prepare Pasta
2. Boil noodles al dente, drain and season. Prepare seasoning for your pasta noodles. In a skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Once oil is heated, add smoked paprika and the second it becomes fragrant, add your onions! Sautee them and make sure that every single dice is covered in the fragrant oil. This is the core of your seasoning! Once onions are softened, remove from heat and add to pasta. In addition to onions, add all of the oil from the pan to the pasta. Mix in well. The pasta should have a slickness to it, so that the pasta doesn’t stick to one another and easily slides past one another. Once mixed in, taste. Get a feel for how flavorful it is. Once you know your palate’s desire, add garlic powder and nutritional yeast. Taste again. Now add salt to amplify the flavor and bring everything out. At this point your noodles should taste like God approved it on it’s own, with or WITHOUT the cheese sauce! Set noodles aside and Prepare the cheese sauce.

“Cheese” Sauce

1. Measure out 1 cup of cashews and soak in spring water for minimum of 4 hours or overnight To a blender add soaked cashews, garlic cloves, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard, turmeric, nutritional yeast, cashew cultured milk, plain cashew yogurt and Tree Line Scallion flavored cashew cheese, butternut squash and salt. Blend Once properly mixed and creamy, taste it. Does it need the flavors to be lifted? Add salt. Does it need more pungency? Add more apple cider vinegar. Does it need a more cheesey flavor? Add more nutritional yeast or Tree Line scallion cashew cheese. Is it too thick? Add a bit more cashew cultured milk or cashew yogurt plain. Is it too light in color? Add more turmeric. Is it perfect as it is? Congratulations. Now pour this creamy, cheesey, cashew goodness into your noodles, a bit at a time. Don’t pour all of it at once. Perhaps start with half of the cheese mixture into your noodles and begin folding it into the noodles. The goal is to have your spiral noodles hug into the sauce. Meaning you want the sauce to coat every bit of the surface area so that you have maximum flavor in every bite! Once the noodles are coated fully, then add a little bit more cheese sauce so that it’s saucy. During the baking process, some of this sauce will “dry”, so before baking, make sure that your mixture is more on the “wet” side. Be generous with your sauce, so that the outcome is creamy. Pour your sauced noodles into a well oiled baking dish or cast iron skillet (top with optional toppings) and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. You don’t need to bake long because you are not baking eggs or anything raw. You are simply heating so that all things marry and gel and fuse. 

Breadcrumb Topping

1. TOPPINGS OPTIONAL: Feel free to mix in vegan cheese shreds with pasta or top with vegan cheese shreds. This may contribute to a more “authentic” feel. Personally, I find the vegan cheese shreds on the market to have an aftertaste that ruins it. So I tend to not. Instead I melt coconut oil in a pan and add panko bread crumbs and sautee them. Once they start to become golden I add minced garlic and keep mixing them in so the bread crumbs are crispy and garlicky. Once it’s golden and fragrantly garlic, I add nutritional yeast and mix just enough to incorporate then I top the macaroni and cheese with that! Be mindful that while you are “cooking” the breadcrumbs, they can burn easily, so it’s important to keep them constantly moving around by way of a spatula during this process. Adding bread crumbs or vegan cheese shreds gives the finished “look” of mac n cheese and adds an extra layer of flavor! The point to this vegan mac n cheese alternative is not to replace cheese, BUT to create the creamy, richness and mouth “feel” of mac n cheese that we love! Enjoy