Notes:
You can vary the cheese amount depending on how it’s packaged at your store. It’s not exact! Also, I use 1% milk because it’s already plenty rich with all the cheese.
Marinate the chicken in the sauce ahead of time. I didn’t include marinating time in the prep time!
Prep ahead of time:
Cut chicken breasts into very small pieces. Toss in a bowl with enough buffalo sauce to coat plus a little extra, and let sit for at least an hour. Stir it every now and then. The chicken will start to look like it’s just slightly cooked; that’s the acid denaturing the proteins. It’s normal.
Cooking:
Simmer the whole bowlful in a pan, sauce and all, on medium heat until the chicken is cooked. Drain the cooked sauce/chicken liquid from the chicken and toss the chicken bits with a little more buffalo sauce. Set this aside to cool some while you do the sauce and pasta.
Shred the extra sharp cheddar, Monterey jack and crumble the blue cheese into a big mixing bowl. Set aside about a half cup of the cheeses in a separate bowl to make the topping later. Stir the rest in the big bowl together with sour cream and some black pepper to taste.
Heat the oven to 350F. Start a pot of boiling salted water for the pasta.
In a medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium-high heat and when melted, whisk in the flour. Keep whisking while it cooks and bubbles for about 2 minutes. (This is called a roux.) Whisk the milk into this mixture and stir often.
When the mixture is starting to get hot, put the pasta in the boiling pot to cook for about 8 minutes. During this time, keep whisking the milk sauce until it’s thickened. (At this point, you’ve now made a bechamel sauce!)
Mix the sauce into the cheese and sour cream in the big bowl and stir well to get the cheese mostly mixed into the sauce. Stir in the pasta. Fold in the chicken. Pour into a 13×9 casserole pan.
Using a fork, mix the breadcrumbs, the small bowl of cheese and a drizzle of buffalo sauce, adding more sauce as needed until it has a crumbly texture. Sprinkle this topping over the macaroni and cheese.
Bake for about a half hour or until the sauce is bubbling around the edges and the topping is starting to get browned.
Makes 6-8 servings, depending on how hungry your family is!
I have to say too, I have never made mac & cheese from scratch, and I followed the recipe to a T and it came out perfect! Great job writing it.
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aainmexico on 9.30.2010
This was great! I already have a mac & cheese recipe that I love and is my favorite comfort food (plus I already had all the ingredients), so I sort of combined our two recipes and created pure magic. Thank you for sharing. Or at least I think I’m thanking you – the only problem with this recipe is that I am going to want to eat it all the time!
By the way, I don’t live in the USA so I had to make my buffalo sauce from scratch. Following a recipe for the sauce I found on another site, I combined equal parts hot sauce and melted butter with a splash of vinegar. It worked just fine, although I have already found a different sauce recipe that I need to try soon… see? I told you I would want to eat it all the time.
ziggerbean on 5.9.2010
My pickiest eater really enjoyed this! I only used 4 oz bleu cheese (because it is so expensive!) but next time I would use the amount called for in the recipe.
shayna41 on 3.22.2010
Delicious! I made this the other night and my husband said it was one of the best things I’ve ever made.