Take your pasta up a notch with Roasted Garlic & Bacon Macaroni and Cheese. With mellow garlic, and crisp bacon you’ll find these flavors are irresistible.
I’ll be honest, my little girls will flat out refuse to eat any macaroni & cheese that doesn’t come from a certain blue box…you know the one. But for me, I like my macaroni and cheese to actually have some substance. I’ve been making baked macaroni and cheese my entire adult life, a very basic recipe that resulted in most awesome of comfort foods, never let me down. So why change up a good thing? I just felt like fancying it up a bit and then it turned out so yummy that I starting alternating between the standard version & my grown-up version.
If you’ve never roasted your own garlic, you’ll want to click here to read my post on Roasted Garlic Spread which gives you the very easy directions. Surely you could substitute minced garlic in this recipe, just add it when melting the butter for the sauce. Now you can certainly mix it up and add in additional ingredients, but I find that sometimes simpler is best so ta-da…enjoy my “Roasted Garlic & Bacon Macaroni & Cheese“.
Roasted Garlic & Bacon Macaroni and Cheese
Ingredients
- 16 oz. dry pasta (I used penne)
- 2 T butter
- 1 T roasted garlic or minced garlic
- 1 t onion powder
- 1 t salt
- 1/2 t ground pepper
- 1/4 cup flour
- 2 cups milk
- 4 cups shredded sharp cheddar, divided
- 3 slices bacon, cooked & chopped
- 1/2 cup Panko breadcrumbs
- 2 T butter, melted
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- In large pot boil water & cook pasta according to package directions.
- In large saucepan melt 2 T butter, whisk in onion powder, flour & milk. Cook until slightly thickened. Add 2 cups of shredded cheese, stir until melted. Now stir in roasted garlic (if you are not using roasted garlic, add minced garlic when melting butter for sauce). Remove from heat.
- When pasta is cooked and drained, stir together with cheese mixture, bacon and 2 cups of shredded cheese.
- Spoon into greased 13x9 baking dish.
- Combine Panko breadcrumbs and 2 T melted butter, sprinkle over top of macaroni and cheese.
- Bake 20 minutes. Broil 2 minutes after baking if you'd like breadcrumbs & cheese to crisp.
My husband loves macaroni and cheese. He loves bacon. Putting them together? Perfect!!
Oh. My. Gosh. The perfect trifecta – cheese, garlic and bacon! What more could one want?! I WILL be trying this, and my children WILL like it!!
Thank you for you.I Ilike to eat Macaroni.
Do you think this could be done in the crockpot? Not as a freezer meal, but just as a crockpot meal?
I use a half a pound of cooked bacon well rinsed under hot water for a couple minutes then chopped & stirred into the melted cheese mixture when I make mine. My family can’t get enough of it. It also went over very well at my daughters very small wedding. I made a roasting pan full & it was all gone when I went to get some. Haha!
I always remember, as a kid my Uncle Joe would make the most delicious casserole which to the best of my knowledge had bacon, cheese, garlic, onions and of course macaroni. I’ve tried numerous variations of those ingredients, yet have never been able to reproduce the absolutely scrumptious flavor I remember when digging into Uncle Joe’s secret recipe casserole. As a kid I wasn’t thinking about how to make the casserole, of course I was focused on making sure I got seconds of all that funniness. Thank you for sharing your recipe. I dunno if there was any other seasonings he included. But, I will most definitely try your recipe which I’m sure is really yummy too. My Uncle Joe and Aunt Margaret were warm, loving wonderful people. I bet the special ingredient that made his casserole so yummy was love.
Thanks again.