Make Restaurant-Quality Mac And Cheese Sauce With One Unlikely Ingredient

Perhaps when trying to replicate our decadent French onion mac and cheese, you have frustratingly noticed that heating up various cheeses resulted in a textured, gooey mass. The good news: If you've found yourself suffering from curdling cheese sauce, there's a pill for that. 

While we can't say that we browse pharmacy shelves to improve our home cooking on the regular, when it comes to making smoother mac and cheese, there is one product that can take even a simple mac and cheese recipe to new heights: Aspirin-free Alka-Seltzer, which is made with baking soda and citric acid. The two chemicals come together to build an emulsifying salt known as sodium citrate. It's a bit of a chemistry lesson in your kitchen, but adding the tablet to water, letting the fizz settle, then getting to work creating sauce with unsalted butter and shredded cheese will have you on your way to better-tasting bowls of mac and cheese.

Popping a pill into the pot you use to make cheese sauce on your stovetop will help keep cheese intact. Instead of a separated, curdling batch of oil and cheese, you will be stirring a smoother, creamier sauce that you can pour and distribute. Without the Alka-Seltzer, heated cheese can separate into what looks like curdles. When sodium citrate enters the equation, however, it clings to calcium deposits and breaks them up while infusing sodium ions into your culinary creation. The result, sodium caseinate, leads to a smoother emulsion. 

Whatever cheese you decide to use, get ready to serve the most decadent mac and cheese that has come out of your kitchen. With the addition of Alka-Seltzer, your next 3-cheese mushroom mac and cheese is about to be smooth, rich, and comforting, and it will give your favorite restaurant's recipe some serious competition.