Last week, the Year 10 Food and Society Class held its inaugural “Macaroni & Cheese: Students vs the School’s Iron Chef”. During an extra for the class, Green issued the challenge to the students of the class who accepted the challenge! Despite not liking Mac and Cheese, the Bornstein twins experimented with adding olives, spinach and sundried tomatoes, creating an aesthetically award-winning meal with gourmet flourishes. Other attempts to raise the nutritional content included the addition of Broccoli. Jacob Levy and Luka Friedman experimented with giant pasta shells in which they added a professionally produced Bechamel sauce, finishing with a spring onion garnish. Luka added that small meatballs in each shell would improve the dish. Ben Aghion redefined a family favourite recipe, which harked back to the original Mac and Cheese, with pasta spices and cheese sauce and was able to recreate what Matt Preston calls the archetypal ‘food memory’ of the dish. Drawing on a trusted and tested family favourite, Iron Chef Damien Green incorporated the mystery ingredient of Crushed Cheese Smiths Crisps into the topping of his Mornay Mac & Cheese recipe. Aghion raised the challenge of incorporating this ingredient. The trick to creating a good Mac and Cheese is a sauce steeped in a flavour base of butter, olive oil, onions and garlic, to which tuna was added before turning all into a bechamel. Method trick employed included getting the pasta al dente, adding the Bechamel and baking the dip pronto, in order to get the cheese and panko crumbs on the top golden brown and firm. Iron Chef Green’s workspace was clean, as was his wash-up completed before the others with time to spare. 

By consensus of the Judge Keren Gengut-Mushinsky and the students who tasted it, Iron Chef Green’s Mornay Mac and Cheese was declared the winner!