 Hi, my name is Vanessa and this is my husband Mason. Today we will be making five different smoked mac and cheese recipes to see which one we like best. So mac and cheese is a crowd pleaser, one of the best sides you can make at your barbecue, but we've never made smoked mac and cheese. So today we took five super popular recipes for smoked mac and cheese and we'll walk you through each one with us talking about things we liked, maybe didn't like so much, the types of cheese, bread crumb topping, cook time, temperature, things like that. At the end we'll talk about maybe the ways we would go about making the ultimate smoked mac and cheese. All right, let's get into it. First we have a recipe from Malcolm Reed of How to Barbecue Right. His recipe is the only one that uses Velveeta and another shortcut ingredient in cream of mushroom. This is great if you don't want to make a cheese sauce and we love that everything just cooks in one pan. This one cooks at probably the highest temperature on the list at 350 and everything just goes for about an hour, stirring I think at the 30 minute mark. And I mean you can see the sauce is very creamy. It's very, very cheesy. I mean in addition to the Velveeta I think you have another pound of grated cheddar. So it's a very cheesy high cheese to pasta ratio. Our only critique would be the topping. His recipe just calls for plain breadcrumbs. We added I think two tablespoons of butter and thought it was still a little too dry. So I would definitely add maybe a fourth cup of butter to your breadcrumbs. Maybe a little more. We like I said added the two tablespoons and then I also added some avocado oil spray because it looked a little dry. But the topping does get pretty crisp here. You can see nice golden brown and the sauce like I said is ultra cheesy and rich. So it'll make up for a little bit of dryness in the topping. We let this one sit a little too long before we scooped it. But overall great recipe. Next up we have Vanessa's favorite recipe and that was Traeger's smoked mac and cheese. This recipe starts out with a sauce that smoked on its own. And it has butter, cream cheese, half and half. And you'll hear from us a bit later on how we believe cream cheese and half and half are the keys to ultimate smoked mac and cheese. This one's great if you're looking for an easier recipe kind of like Malcom's. Since you don't have to make a cheese sauce you just throw this in the smoker while you cook your macaroni and grate some cheese. All that gets mixed together before you throw on your topping. Unfortunately this one also has a bit of a dry topping. It does use panko breadcrumbs which we found were our favorite topping selection. But it only calls for two tablespoons of butter. This goes in and cooks at 350 so higher temperature. But despite that the topping still didn't get that crunchy. And we ran into the issues where it was a little bit more casserole than creamy mac but amazing flavor. Next up we have a recipe from Matt Pittman of Meat Church and from this point forward we'll be making kind of classic cheese sauces or bechamel. The old fashioned way. So a bit more labor intensive. Is it worth it? We're not so sure. This is a bit time consuming. But you do get a great flavor and ultra smooth sauce. Our only issue with this recipe maybe. Well let me start by saying the flavor on this recipe is amazing. It's got some meat church holy cow in there. Three types of cheese. We thought the cheese sauce was very white pizza or just very kind of like Italian mac and cheese almost. It had like a white pizza flavor with the inclusion of parmesan. And you'll see the sauce is very cheese pulley and not so creamy due to probably the parmesan. We could have had our ratios slightly off here. But it is worth noting this is an extra cheese pulley sauce. Unfortunately we had another slightly under hydrated topping. Could use a bit more butter and maybe even panko breadcrumbs instead of traditional. Topping aside the flavor on this is amazing. I'll be at a little untraditional with some slight changes to the topping. It's probably the best on the list. Three down. Two to go. How we feeling? I'm very tired. What about you? What do you smell? How's it going? Induction sucks. We'll use the real stove next time. You're hogging all the space. Sorry. Dude's come first. I can imagine that would probably take four hours trying to boil that much water. What's this? On recipe number four right? Number four. That's probably as many ingredients as the other four recipes combined. It's called million dollar mac and cheese. So it's got to taste like a million bucks. What do you think? What do you think? So the million dollar mac and cheese from barbecuing with the Nolan's definitely not the most traditional mac and cheese on the list. A little more complex and in a good way. It calls for cooked bacon but not in this order. But I figured why not cook the bacon in the same skillet that we're making the cheese sauce in. This one's a little unique with the inclusion of onion, some garlic, which you can definitely tell are both there in the finished cheese sauce. So if you're an Allium fan, great. If not, maybe not the one for you. We both kind of agree this is probably not the mac and cheese to take to a holiday or cook out where people are expecting classic mac and cheese. It's definitely a bit different. And the ingredient list like I mentioned in the intro before this is a bit long but it is a good mac and cheese. Don't get me wrong. I like the inclusion of the cheddar and the pepper jack. You can't really go wrong with that cheese selection. I will say we messed up here. This is supposed to be sliced Havarti. We definitely just grated it, some spreading on sour cream between a second layer. It's kind of tough. So we just mixed it all together and then we added freshly grated Parmesan. We weren't sure if I had to take a guess. I think this was supposed to be like dried, grated, refrigerated Parmesan, the cheap stuff. Getting to the best part of this is the panko breadcrumb topping. It's a revelation. It blows every other topping on this list out of the water. I don't know if I'll ever make another smoked or baked mac and cheese that doesn't have a pre-toasted breadcrumb topping. And you can see here this one goes on at like 225 and it keeps the cheese sauce very creamy. It's a very delicious mac and cheese albeit a little different. Last but not least we have one from Hey Grill Hey. We were running out of gas at this point. So Vanessa's on the ones and twos making the cheese sauce here. She's not made many cheese sauces so we're not sure if it should be this thick or not. But we remedied it by keeping some pasta water in the macaroni to kind of thin that sauce out. And honestly I mean it's really good. You know I believe this is probably Vanessa's number two. And we both agreed it was probably like the most classic mac and cheese in terms of like the filling underneath the topping. The most classic of the bunch. This recipe includes some rub in the breadcrumb topping which was really nice. We used her sweet rub and it definitely helps balance out some of the salty mac. That was a really long cook day. We decided to make all five of these smoked mac and cheese recipes in one day. Not recommended. But they all taste really good and most importantly we learned a lot today about smoked mac and cheese. That's right. So starting in with type of cheese. I think Vanessa's favorites Hey Grill Hey. I think Traeger probably number one for you. Oh yeah. Both used cream cheese and half and half instead of whole milk. Other than those two components. What do you think about cheese selection? I think that sharp cheddar, Gouda and maybe one other was like the most consistent in terms of what I liked of flavor. Anything that got a little too complex or different from a traditional mac and cheese wasn't my personal favorite. Right. Meat church. I think maybe a little too much Parmesan Gruyere. It was really good actually. I thought that one was going to be my favorite until I tried the Traeger. Yes. Yeah. It's not the most traditional flavor. I think you said it kind of reminded you of like a white pizza sauce. Yes. It very much tasted like a white pizza. It was really good. Really good. A little untraditional. Yeah. So million dollar mac and cheese. I prefer what I like to call kid friendly recipes and this one had a lot of onion for me and as a person with a toddler flavor palate this was a little too grown up for me. I would agree. I finally maybe not finely diced but those onions were diced rather small. Has a long cook time. Those onions even cook in the in the cheese sauce a bit and there's still a bit of bite in there. They're they're a little noticeable for my liking in a mac and cheese. Maybe a little more elevated but again probably not your holiday mac and cheese. Not to bash million dollar mac and cheese. I think one of my favorite my favorite component of the day was probably the toasted the skillet toasted breadcrumb topping which speaking of breadcrumbs I think Panko is the clear winner. Absolutely. Any traditional breadcrumbs we use either they were under hydrated with with the butter fat whatever with these I even sprayed some avocado oil on top just because I thought it looked way too sandy. You see people say like I don't want kitty litter on my mac and cheese and that's kind of what we were leaning towards. So even we tried to remedy that but they were still very dry very sandy. Panko not as much especially in the one that was pre toasted. Actually I've seen Traeger's recipe now the original doesn't call for this but in an updated video they pre toast the breadcrumbs topping so it's extra golden brown. As the resident baker of this house I'm typically not a savory cook so I really enjoyed that Malcolm's mac and cheese recipe was all in one. You just threw it in there the pasta and everything cooked on the Traeger so it's kind of dummy proof for someone like me. Yes after making all the others I would say they can be a little labor intensive if you don't want to make that cheese sauce. There was no discernible difference between Malcolm's macaroni and any of the others. It does cook at a bit higher temperature 350 so you know if you're wanting to just throw uncooked pasta in there I'm not sure unlike the Hey girl hey or million dollar mac and cheese that cook at those lower temperatures I'm not sure how long it would need to cook in there and if that's the case you may need to leave off your breadcrumb topping just so you don't dry it out too much again not really sure which kind of is a good segue into making our ultimate mac and cheese right Vanessa said she's ready to tackle it so we're going to make that next separate video don't worry we'll come back and link that below what do you think will be in our ultimate smoked mac and cheese I definitely think you need to have cream cheese in half and half that combination was in our top two favorites so I think that's a must and you got to have panko breadcrumbs yes yeah panko breadcrumbs I think we'll probably toast them in the olive oil and butter in a skillet before we add them I think other cheese selection will go sharp cheddar maybe another soft melting cheese and if we use parmesan it might be either incorporated into the breadcrumb topping or just below it I think we like a creamier sauce as opposed to that pulley cheese pull sauce so we'll go that route and if we can we're definitely going to try the macaroni the pasta will go in uncooked and just smoke the whole time on the smoker where you don't have to make any cheese sauce cook any we might even make a cheese sauce but you won't have to cook the pasta separately our kitchen was an absolute wreck that Vanessa took over my job as the resident dishwasher so don't recommend cooking five different recipes all in one day but it was worth it and we got to eat some mac and cheese which is always a great day that's right and we're gonna eat some more and so anyway if you learned anything today we appreciate if you liked the video leave us a comment subscribe we'll be making more of these videos and at least you gotta come back and check out our finished ultimate smoked mac and cheese we'll see you next time bye