 My name is Mason Woodruff and I've been running a food blog called Kind of Healthy Recipes for the past six or seven years now. I've made a lot of protein mac and cheese in my day, but I don't think I've ever made the best. But we're going to find out. By the end of this video, we should know who has the best protein mac and cheese recipe on the internet. Spoiler, it's going to be the ultimate version that we make at the very end. But let's first take a look at the six competitors we'll be testing today. We have a one pot mac and cheese from Zach, the flexible dieting lifestyle, a beefy taco mac and cheese from Tom Walsh, Ethan's white cheddar mac and cheese with grilled chicken and peas, a queso and bacon mac and cheese from Matt, hidden veggie mac and cheese from Josh, the meal prep manual and a one pan chicken bacon ranch mac and cheese from me. Here's a macro comparison for everyone's recipe, including a percent of calories from protein to account for serving size differences, but none of this means anything if the recipes don't taste great. So let's get into that. Let's begin by answering the question, is there a superior macaroni option for protein mac and cheese? Four out of the six recipes I tested called for traditional wheat pasta, while the other two called for chickpea based protein pasta. In terms of taste, texture and how well a dish reheats, it's hard to beat plain old macaroni, but there are tons of protein pastas on the market. So are the improvements to macros worth it? Well, that's up to you. Looking at this side by side comparison, you'll get a few extra grams of protein and fiber per serving while reducing the carbs and slightly increasing the fat. The extra fiber and protein may create a more filling mac and cheese, but the overall impact to macros per serving is pretty small. In my opinion, the trade-offs for a few extra grams of protein aren't worth it. As a final note about pasta selection, using shells instead of elbows is a great idea for any mac and cheese recipe that includes proteins like ground beef or ground chicken. The shells will soak up all the meat and cheese and make for a much more pleasant eating experience. It's almost like eating cheesy stuffed shells. Speaking of cheese, this is where things get a bit more interesting. The recipes I tested range from blended sauces with and without hidden veggies to shortcut ingredients like dehydrated cheddar powder, queso and spreadable cheese wedges. My biggest takeaway from testing all these recipes is that there's no perfect cheese sauce. Each sauce has its own pros and cons. If you struggle to eat vegetables, making something like Josh's roasted carrot and cauliflower cheese sauce is a great option for sneaking some in and adding a ton of volume to the recipe. The serving sizes for Josh's mac and cheese are massive. The downside to this cheese sauce is pretty obvious, cauliflower. In what might be my favorite recipe of the bunch, Tom's taco mac and cheese, the blended cottage cheese sauce is bland on its own. But once it's added to a very seasoned beef and veggie-filled macaroni, it soaks up flavor and creates a very creamy mac and cheese. Zach's mac and cheese is the creamiest of the bunch and by far the easiest, but it could handle a bit of seasoning since it's not paired with anything else. Similar to Zach's, Ethan's one-pot mac and cheese uses one of my favorite shortcut ingredients in cheddar powder. If you're unfamiliar with this ingredient, it's kind of like powdered peanut butter. You can rehydrate it with a little bit of water or other ingredients like the sour cream and Ethan's recipe to create a perfectly homogenous flavorful cheese sauce in seconds without most of the fat. While we're on shortcut ingredients, the queso and cheese wedges and Matt's recipe really surprised me. His recipe had one of my favorite flavor profiles of the bunch and required essentially zero prep. But if you're not a fan of the Tex-Mex flavor profile, those ingredients may not work for you. The chicken bacon ranch mac and cheese from yours truly has a cheese sauce that's made by folding freshly grated cheese straight in the pan with cooked pasta and seasoned ground chicken. While it's easy and cheesy, the sauce loses a bit of its creaminess once it's broiled with cheese topping before serving. It's definitely not the creamiest sauce of the bunch. And by the way, while I'm a proponent of using freshly grated cheese straight off the block, the recipes that call for pre-shredded cheese from a bag had perfectly good cheese sauces. I didn't have issues with melting or overly cheese-pulling sauces. The only cheese sauce ingredient I'm down on is nutritional yeast. While it may add a bit of protein and serve as a great parmesan replacement in plant-based diets, I hope to never cross its path again. You can only add so much protein to mac and cheese through cheese sauce, hags, and protein pastas. If you want to take your mac and cheese from macro-friendly side dish to protein-packed main dish, you'll have to add a bit of meat. The recipes I tested used bacon, ground beef or chicken, oven roasted chicken breasts, and grilled chicken. My favorites were the ground beef and Tom's taco mac and cheese and the combination of ground chicken and bacon and my chicken bacon ranch mac and cheese. And this is the point where I realized including my own recipe in this experiment was a mistake. I like the ground meats best because they're easiest to cook. They also reheat really well in case you're planning to use your protein mac and cheese for meal prep. So I will add here that Josh's recipe calls for chopping the roasted chicken into tiny pieces so you barely notice it. But I found that it also takes care of any reheating issues. Bacon is great, obviously, but it's not the leanest protein option, and it needs to be paired with the right flavor profile. And as a final note, if you have grilled chicken or pulled rotisserie chicken, pairing it with frozen peas and a simple one-pot pasta like Ethan's mac and cheese is a great use case scenario. The technical and time requirements of a recipe may be near the end of this video, but they are very important ranking factors. Zach, Ethan, and as much as I hate to say it, the guy from Kind of Healthy Recipes all get bonus points for being made in a single pan or pot. And Matt's recipe could easily be made a single dish recipe if you left out the bacon or use pre-cooked bacon. That said, I love the veggies in Josh and Tom's recipes both for flavor and volume. The extra time spent making the recipe translate to more food in this case, and it's not like you're wasting time or doing overly complicated tasks in the kitchen. Bonus, you'll also burn a ton of calories washing all the dishes. So it's really a question of what you're looking for. I can say the juice is worth the squeeze with all six of these recipes. But what about the juiciest squeeze of them all? Next up, I'll take you through my Ultimate Protein Mac and Cheese. Keep in mind, this is my ultimate recipe. Your ultimate recipe may have a different flavor profile, protein options, or additional ingredients, or macros. But hopefully this walkthrough will give you an idea of how to take these recipes and adapt them to make your own ultimate version. Okay, that's a lot of talk about protein mac and cheese. Six recipes in. We have one more to go. I'm gonna do my best attempt at the ultimate protein mac and cheese. Let's start with the cheese sauce. I'm using a blended cottage cheese milk and cheese sauce. This will closely resemble Tom's Taco Mac and Cheese. Instead of using cheddar powder, which I know not everyone has, I'm using a blend of Gouda. And this is actually like a Chipotle Gouda Gruyere would also be a great option. And then just extra sharp cheddar. Nutritional yeast, like I mentioned, I don't love the flavor of it unless you're making a plant-based mac and cheese. I think you can pretty much throw that in the garbage. In terms of the added protein, I'm going with ground chicken. I considered using a baked and chopped chicken like Josh's Mac and Cheese or the grilled chicken in Ethan's Mac and Cheese for a more premium feel. But after making six Mac and Cheese recipes in two days, ground chicken just sounds so much easier. It also opens up the possibility that we can just throw in our pasta, a little bit of seasoning, some chicken broth or water, to cook everything in one pan. And speaking of pasta, we're using classic wheat pasta. After comparing the macros from protein pastas and chickpea pastas and all the impastas, I'm not sure that the macro differences are worth the trade-offs in terms of how well Mac and Cheese will reheat, leftover and just overall taste and texture. That said, you're welcome to use any pasta you like with this recipe if you decide those macro differences are worth it to you. And finally, let's talk about a topping. I really preferred the Mac and Cheese recipes that had a broiled cheese topping and I considered doing something similar with this recipe, but I decided to borrow something I learned from my ultimate smoked Mac and Cheese cook-off we did where we do a toasted panko breadcrumb topping where in that one I used pancetta and this one we'll use a little bit of center cut bacon, cook that down, crisp it up and then in the rendered fat we'll toast some panko breadcrumbs. Those will go on at the very end with the bacon, a little bit of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and fresh parsley and I think that's gonna give us a nice crunchy topping without adding a ton of carbs and fat, but after all this is a Mac and Cheese, can we make it as rich as possible while still having a good punch of protein? And that's our ultimate smoked Mac and Cheese recipe. If you'd like to print this recipe, I'll throw a link in the description below. If you enjoyed this video and would like to see more cook-offs and ultimate versions of high protein, macro-friendly dishes, let me know which dishes I should tackle in the comments below and be sure to check out some of our other videos while you're here.