ottawa foodies

Hey folks,

Is there a source of good bulk mac and cheese powder? The stuff from the bulk barn is pretty crappy when you read the ingredients. I used to get stuff in Nova Scotia that was pretty good.

thanks,
-Alan

Zym, is this "for a friend"? hehe, I'm shocked you're actually looking for this crap. You might want to try calling up Rainbow Foods or Natural Food Pantry to see if they stock it in their bulk sections.

zymurgist? is that you?

Haha.. zym's getting the same reaction that I do from coworkers when I eat a can of Chef Boyardee for lunch! :-)

Ha, ha. No, it is for me. It is to go with the organic whole wheat macaroni if that is any consolation :-) Some of the cheese powders out there are actually not that bad at all as far as ingredients goes - like Annie's All Natural. Even KD is not that bad to be honest. The bulk barn stuff is terrible.

They don't get it often, but we do feed them box mac and cheese. I'm finally getting rid of the packaging of the boxes - if I can find a decent cheese powder that is.

I'm just surprised that you haven't tried dehydrating finely grated cheese, then grind to a powder, etc. At least this way you know what's in it.
www.ehow.com

I'm kind of certain Zymurgist just had the same eureka moment.
He'll be back in just a second.
Ha

I've had it in camp food before, works fairly well to add a cheesy taste to something.

i am also surprised about the cheese mix. i takes me the length of time to cook the pasta that is does to make a quick cheese sauce. if you do find a cheese powder, i would be interested in looking at the ingredient mix. my homemade sauce is butter, flour, milk & cheese. quick and easy, served with whole wheat macaroni.

Try making your own with dehydrated cheese & milk powder. Cheers!

Here is what we normally give them - you can see the ingredients on the site

www.annies.com

But I want to start using whole wheat and the Annie's stuff we get is not. Interestingly enough, Kraft now has a WW mac and cheese.

I may well just end up coming up with a quick cheese sauce. Can you post your recipe HFF? My wife has a good one but I've never made it so am not sure how quick it is.

Hmmm, just checking the dehydration site. That's interesting - it did enter my head originally but not sure why I dismissed it. That might be a good use for the el-cheapo cheese from Costco.

I feel a video coming on :-)

the ingredient list for annie's is pretty simple. i'll keep watching this thread to see if anyone finds something in bulk.

my cheese sauce for the kid's mac & cheese is not fancy. for a heaping cup of dry pasta, i do the following for the sauce (i don't measure). i shred cheese while the water is coming to a boil, about a large handful - hard to measure this because it gets eaten by my son while i am shredding it. when i put the pasta in the boiling water, i then start the sauce. over med-low heat, i melt a knob of butter in a saucepan, when melted, add a spoonful of flour and use the whisk to mix in thoroughly. i then slowing add about a cup of milk, putting in 1/4 cup at a time and whisk in. it should be fairly thick by the time the pasta is ready. i throw in the shredded cheese to the thickened sauce, drain the pasta, whisk the sauce to make sure all cheese is melted and then toss the pasta with the sauce. i don't bother baking it, just serve it as is.

if i do it fancier, i add a dash of dry mustard powder, a dash of cayenne, black pepper and nice cheese. if it is just a we need dinner in 10 minutes, it is whatever cheese is open. i like more sauce per pasta.

Here is the stuff from the bulk barn

www.bulkbarn.ca

I'm not as good as nefarious ingredients as my wife is, but to me "silicon dioxide" sound like sand!

Wheat flour, modified milk ingredients, maltodextrin, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, corn starch, cheddar cheese (milk, bacterial culture, salt, calcium chloride, microbial enzymes), natural flavour, disodium phosphate, silicon dioxide, autolyzed yeast extract, citric acid, artificial colour.

HFF: I've often done small amounts of homemade mac and cheese the same way as you describe. The biggest reason I like to have some of the Annie's stuff on hand is because sometimes it's just busy and I don't want to be tied to the kitchen/stove for the food prep time. Being able to dump the powder, milk, and butter into the pot and mix when ready is convenient. :)

FWIW, I find the addition of dill to the sauce to be quite yummy!

Not that I want to encourage him overly much in starting any new "projects" right now, but thought this might be of interest:

www.ehow.com

It contains instructions on powdering cheese. ;)

Yeah, I'm cut off on any new video projects until the baby is here (any week now). But I have a week or so off work right after the birth so I'll be sure to get in a cheese dehydration video at that time :-)

i haven't run into a problem with making cheese sauce - yet. so if you do find a bulk source i'll be interested in hearing about it. i have bought the organic whole wheat mac and cheese at superstore to use when we were travelling (can't remember brand, though it wasn't annie's).

FF - this one's for you:
Woman claims rodent found in Chef Boyardee spaghetti
By QMI Agency
An Ohio mother says she found a dead rodent in a can of spaghetti and meatballs.
"I opened it up and my face was very close to it and immediately you could tell there was a dead rodent on top, in fact you couldn't even see the spaghetti and meatballs at all," Jennifer Aker told television station WCPO.
She called the manufacturer, ConAgra Foods, to complain and try to figure out how such a mistake could happen. The company asked her to take a still photo of the supposed rodent and then freeze the entire contents of the can so they could be analyzed later.
Her nephew Daniel took it one step further, though, and recorded a video of the can being emptied into a Tupperware container. The blurry image shows a large brown clump falling from the can of Chef Boyardee-brand spaghetti and meatballs.
The family posted the video on YouTube, where it has more than 5,400 views since it was posted on April 14.
ConAgra released a statement about the alleged rodent, and sent a courier to the Aker home to pick up the tainted can of spaghetti so it could be analyzed.
"We take all consumer inquiries seriously, and when a consumer has a bad experience, we work with them to determine the source of the problem and correct it. We also work with them to make up for their experience as best as we are able," a spokesperson said.

It used to be said that the average person eats 1 rat and X number of cockroaches per year. This assumes a diet of highly processed food - basically stuff falling into machines and then getting ground up into the stuff.

Something to keep in mind whenever eating processed food.

I'm pretty sure "rat" is a standard ingredient in the filling of the ravioli (the only thing I ever eat from Chef Boyardee). What else could form such a grainy, grey, pâté? ;-)

i haven't heard that stat zym, but have heard about never drinking pop from a can due to the urine. my dad always had lots of stories about working in a canning factory "peeing on the peas" comes to mind as one way they got back at management for poor working conditions.

edit to add - the urine on cans due to the mice/rats in the warehouse.

I've learned to wash the tops of all cans due to storing them in my own basement and having to blow the mice shit off them before opening :-)

BTW, just today someone at work said they "knew someone" who died from this, and I had to call up snopes on that one :-)

So they got Hanta from their Fanta?

Hahaha! Chimi, that was a gimme!

Besides eating a rat and x cockroaches a year, the other wives tale is, one will eat a pound of dirt before they die.

Myth busters did a segment on rat/mice pee on the tops of pop cans. They swiped thousands of can tops and ran the samples in a gas chromatagraph (detects minute traces of chemicals) and found no mice/rat or any other mammal pee.

I could not find anything in google to either support or refute the rat + x cockroaches, captain. Though I was already aware of the mythbusters thing - that one is also documented in snopes.