In this installment
Zingerman’s Pimento Mac & Cheese Recipe
Pimento Cheese Spread
Zingerman’s Nor’easter Cabot Cheddar Cheese
Rustichella Penne Pasta
How to Make Zingerman’s Pimento Mac & Cheese
Pimento cheese is a classic American spread. Made with cheddar cheese, mayo, pimento peppers, and spices, it’s a salty-tangy-spicy mix fabulous for spreading on crackers or celery sticks. It’s the most popular product made at Zingerman’s Creamery. It also happens to be crazy good in mac and cheese.
Zingerman’s Roadhouse restaurant has been serving this for over a decade to rave reviews. This is a dish you can make with the whole family that they’re sure to enjoy.
1 lb macaroni
1 tbl butter
1/8 c diced onion
1 bay leaf
1 tbl all-purpose flour
¾ c whole milk
1/8 c heavy cream
½ tsp Dijon mustard
½ lb grated cheddar cheese
10 oz Zingerman’s Pimento Cheese
1 tsp olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste
Cook pasta in salted water according to package instructions, then set aside. Melt butter in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and bay leaf and cook till onion softens. Remove bay leaf, add flour. Stir continuously as you slowly add the milk, then cream and simmer for a couple minutes until thick. Reduce heat to low, stir in mustard, shredded cheese, half the pimento cheese and salt. Simmer for five minutes, set aside. In a heavy bottom skillet over high heat, add oil, heat till it smokes, then add cheese, pasta, remaining pimento cheese and cook till it starts to brown. Serves 4
Pimento Cheese Spread
If you’re from the South you were probably raised on it. If you’re from anywhere else you’ve probably never heard of it. Either way, almost everyone who tries pimento cheese thinks it’s a phenomenon.
There are probably more versions of pimento cheese spread in the South than there are grandmothers. Ours, made just down the road at Zingerman’s Creamery, is a salty/tangy/spicy mix of Cabot Vermont Cheddar, Hellmann’s mayo, pimento peppers and spices. At the table it’s got as many roles as Zelig. On a cracker. On a burger, with or without a few slices of bacon. On a slice of bread. Alongside a good crisp apple or a pile of potato chips. Or, like they do at Zingerman’s Roadhouse restaurant (and one of my personal favorites), swept to your mouth on ribs of celery.
Zingerman’s Nor’Easter Cabot Cheddar Cheese
We worked with the cheesemakers at Cabot Creamery for nearly a year to find a cheddar we wanted to call our own and now it’s here!
Aged just under a year, it’s a great snacking cheddar. We select batches that feature creamy texture and hearty, savory flavors that pair well with salami, crackers, crusty bread, beer, wine… Just about anything you want to eat with cheddar will be great with this one.
It’s the perfect accompaniment to your next cheeseburger. At Zingerman’s Roadhouse restaurant, this is the cheddar used in our award-winning Mac n Cheese. Obviously!
Rustichella Penne Pasta
Rustichella was founded in 1924 by Gianluigi Peduzzi’s grandfather Gaetano Serviacomo. The Italian economy at the time was dire. The Italian wheat crop was not good and the prices were high, making it hard for the typical Abruzzese to afford and 95% of all the pasta consumed in the country was made at home.
“When my grandfather started,” Gianluigi said, “in each city was a pasta factory. What my grandfather made was a luxury product and was mainly purchased and consumed on Sundays or during the holy days.” Gianluigi continued. “And the wheat was terrible. Only soft wheat was available, not the hard durum semolina we exclusively use today.”
Sometime in the years after WWII – over three decades after Gaetano got going – things were looking up. But while pasta production overall was booming, it wasn’t a great time for small artisan producers. As in so much of the Western world, agro- industry was taking over. By 1996 – just a few years after the first shipments of artisan pasta in the brown bag arrived in America – Rustichella was one of only 150 or so still out there.
Today, the rise of artisan food in America has reinvigorated high quality pasta production not only in Italy, but here in the states as well. Made using only the hardest durum wheat flour, extruded through traditional bronze dies, which makes the pasta grip the sauce. Slow drying makes the texture chewier and the flavor more intense.