Take it cheesy: Chef Tini breaks down her viral Thanksgiving mac and cheese recipe

Thanksgiving is so close, you can almost taste the gravy on the table. If you haven’t gone to the store to secure your cavatappi pasta noodles, you’re going to want to run right now.

Why those noodles specifically? Well, they are an essential part of the internet’s favorite Thanksgiving mac and cheese recipe. The recipe, created and shared by TikTok chef Tineke “Tini” Younger, went viral in 2023.

Two years later, the recipe has become the go-to for home chefs bringing mac and cheese to Thanksgiving festivities.

Younger says she never expected the recipe to become a classic.

“I didn’t think it would pop off as much as it did because it’s just mac and cheese … but it’s a way to get people in the kitchen,” Younger said.  “And people that don’t usually cook and they’re like, ‘I nailed the mac and cheese.’ So, it’s a reward for me.”

Find the recipe here.

Where did the recipe come from? Did you develop it from a family recipe? Did you learn it at school?

“I’ve always liked mac and cheese … and it kind of was just a bunch of experimenting and stuff that I learned in culinary school. And then the restaurants that I worked in, I was using whole milk instead of evaporated milk. And then I learned what exactly evaporated milk was in school. It’s regular milk, but 60% of the water is evaporated. So you don’t have to really sit there and let it simmer. You get the creaminess with that the extra water and then the cavatappi pasta.”

“I use cavatappi because you want the cream to get in the hole. And people laugh at that because it sounds a little dirty, but it’s like, no, that’s really why I picked it. Because the cream gets in the hole and you bite into the pasta, and it’s just more flavor for you.”

There has been a lot of frenzy over this mac and cheese. Some people are upset it doesn’t work out exactly how they envision, even though maybe they didn’t actually follow the recipe that closely. It is interesting that it sounds like there are maybe some cons to having a food recipe go viral.

“Yeah, I feel like that’s really with any recipe that goes super, super viral, people are always going to have issues with it.  Some people don’t follow the directions, so they’ll blame the person that made it, even though it’s a user error. But I feel like the positive definitely outweighs the negative. The amount of people that … come up to me still, though. I never knew how to cook before, like making your recipes, before making this mac and cheese. But I nailed this mac and cheese, and I became more confident in the kitchen, so that definitely outweighs the negatives.”

For people who are going to make it this year, what are the most common missteps to avoid?

“One, the big one last year was some people were messing up the roux, so their mac and cheese came out grainy and gritty. That could be because you don’t have your heat the correct temperature. I like to do medium just because if it’s too high, you’ll burn your flour, and you don’t fully cook it out all the way, so you’ll have clumps, and we don’t like that. So you really want to take your time with everything with the roux.

“Another one is people kept saying it was soupy, and it’s because they’re dumping the whole can of evaporated milk and heavy cream in without letting it simmer and mix … You have to add it little by little and let it get thick. So you just have to take your time with it.

“And then another reason why, if it’s creamy and gritty, is because your heat is too high when you add the cheese, and your cheese will separate, and it will curdle. So you just have to take it slow. Don’t rush it. I mean, it only takes, max 20 minutes to assemble. So, yeah, you just got to take it slow.”

Do we really have to shred all the cheese by hand?

“You don’t have to do it by hand. You can use KitchenAid; they’ll have a shredding tool or a food processor, but you have to shred the cheese yourself. You cannot use pre-shredded. That is my number one thing. Do not use pre-shredded because there’s a coating on it. They’ll use potato starch on top of the shredded cheese in the stores just so it doesn’t clump up together. Don’t do that in the mac and cheese recipe. It’s not going to melt with how you want it to and it’s going to be grainy and it’s just not going to be creamy.”

This interview was edited for clarity. 

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Kalyani Saxena produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Saxena adapted it for the web.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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