The bags of shredded cheese are coated in a powder to keep it from sticking together, which makes your sauce grainy. Once the noodles are done cooking place towel over lid of pressure cooker and switch the vent to venting. Press the 'Manual' button and set the timer to 4 minutes. Put the lid on the pressure cooker and make sure the vent is set to 'sealing'. One tip for creamy, perfect homemade mac and cheese: don’t use pre-shredded cheese. Add water, garlic powder salt, and pepper. Just one pot and about 20 minutes is all it takes to make homemade mac and cheese. Spice it up with some seasoning and/or Sriracha.Seal the pot, and cook for 4 minutes at high pressure.Dump pasta, water, butter, and salt into the Instant Pot.I tweaked it a bit to give it a little more flavor, but it was a great starter recipe to get me going. When the time is up, do a quick release of the remaining pressure. Close the lid and set your Instant Pot to manual, HIGH PRESSURE for 4 minutes. Add the pasta, salt, mustard, and black pepper. Once cooking has completed, allow for a 2 minute NPR (Natural Pressure Release). Pour the broth into the inner pot of your Instant Pot.
While the pasta cooks, shred the four cheeses. Set the Instant Pot to ‘Manual’ or ‘Pressure Cook’, ‘High Pressure’ for 2 minutes. So I turned to my trusty Instant Pot, to at least keep the level of time and effort the same as the boxed stuff.Īctive Hip Momma’s recipe seemed to be the simplest and most popular one, so I started there. Add the water, pasta, salt and butter to the Instant Pot and give everything a gentle stir. Now, I’m not a crunchy mom in the least, so I don’t even really know what the whole deal with phthalates is, but I did enough Googling to decide I needed to at least attempt to do better for my son, especially in these early years. Extra sharp cheddar cheese has the intense, cheesy flavor that mac and cheese needs, and it melts beautifully into the creamy sauce. Apparently all boxed mac and cheese products have evil, murderous phthalates in them. Whole wheat shells would also work well in this recipe.
And then I found out that my beloved boxed mac and cheese had to be added to our list of things to be terrified of as a mom (it’s a long list, y’all).