Because I’ve been doing this blog for a while now, I will often find a lot of different articles on Google that show me what horrifying thing companies are doing to their foods. Honestly, it’s a blessing and a curse because the food is very interesting, but it just means that I want to eat it more because of my morbid curiosity.
And my curiosity was piqued when I saw the box for the Pumpkin Spice Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of weird food on the internet, but I don’t think anything truly horrified me more than the idea of a pumpkin spice mac and cheese. I didn’t even know how it would match up. And even more concerning was that KRAFT of all companies was going to produce this monstrosity? But I guess it also makes sense because they have perfected the 5 min. mac and cheese? If I’m being completely honest, I think I had a phase in high school where I was eating this cursed cheese every other week, so the taste has always felt kinda off to me. So, I don’t have any fond memories of this mac and cheese.
Finding the Box
The only issue about getting this mac and cheese was the Kraft was only going to release a thousand boxes of this cursed lunch, so the possibility of me getting a box was about zero percent. Which was made even more definite when I found out that these boxes were only going to be given away to Canadians. Which is another reason why I should move up to Canadia.
What else was I supposed to do but… Make it myself! I could have just let it go, but I guess I needed to know desperately how cheese and pumpkin spice were going to taste when partnered together in a forced union. And throughout the minimal research that I did, it turns out I wasn’t the only one who was curious about how to bring the flavors of fall into mac and cheese. There were so many recipes online about how to put pumpkin into your mac and cheese. Honestly, I wasn’t really sure how to take this information. Other than horrified realization that there are people who take the fall season too seriously.
In the end, I decided to just go with my gut and just use pumpkin spice for my recipe. Which is to say that I just added pumpkin spice to Kraft mac and cheese until I could smell the pumpkin spice wafting from the pot. That was probably a bad idea.
Trickery and Deceit
Now, I will say that I didn’t want to eat this alone, so I did convince one of my friends to eat this with me. I baked some pumpkin spice brownies in order to mask the smell upon entering the door, so it wasn’t obvious upon entering my house that I was doing something so devious. But to be fair, I did let them know that we were going to do something that we would regret as soon as the food was consumed.
The look of the mac and cheese was very interesting. I actually thought it looked pretty good! Each noodle was covered in hundreds of little specs that made the noodle look like they had chicken pox. Because each noodle looked the same, it made them look so aesthetically pleasing. It made me think that maybe I wasn’t going to regret it that much.
That all changed after the first bite.
It just looks like a deplorable abomination. That went right into my stomach.
Mistakes
Because I added so much pumpkin spice, I made it too grainy. The texture went from smooth too grainy, and that is never a good transition to make especially when there is pasta involved. It is just an incredibly strange transition to make. If I was making the pasta instead of just adding pumpkin spice at the final steps of making the sauce, then I think that embedding the pumpkin spice into the noodle would make for a better mouth feel. But what I created just made everything feel gross.
Defining Flavor
And the worst part about this whole experience was that the combination didn’t even taste very good. The pumpkin spice ended up dulling the taste of the cheese, which made it just taste like… A plain noodle. Which isn’t something that I’m looking for in my mac and cheese.
In the case of pasta, there is one defining factor that everything that the dish is trying to accent: the sauce. The noodles, the garnish, the additional foods. They all serve their master and are used to bring out the best of that flavor. If you are adding something that negates the sauce, such as the pumpkin spice that I added, it makes the whole dish irrelevant. Why bother having something that just tastes like nothing? It’s like just boiling a noodle and eating it right out of the pot (which is actually something that my brother does… Still don’t really understand his reasoning there).
Final Verdict
Ultimately, I think that there needs to be a very delicate balancing act that has to occur in order to make this dish work. And now that I know that several people online use pumpkin in their mac and cheese, I have absolved to eventually make one of those dishes in order to understand how they balanced out the flavors. My guess is that they added in a whole bunch of cheese in order to counter the pumpkin taste. Or that they used the pumpkin as their primary source of flavor and used the cheese to subtly accent the pumpkin flavor… Which also sounds very unappealing. I might have to write another post about this experience, but I’ll update when I get to that.
I’m curious to know how Kraft has their mac and cheese. I might have to go back after reading other people’s reviews and trying to recreate that flavor from how the describe the flavors.
In any case, I don’t suggest making this at home. Or if you do, try not to use a whole lot of pumpkin spice like I did because the flavors will counter each other and there will be no flavor at all.
I don’t know why I did this.
Final Rating: 2/10. I hate Kraft for making me do this.
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