Kraft Apple Pie Flavor Mac & Cheese

By Martin Peyruc, Life News Today

The Reckless Gastronome

Greetings my fellow travelers on the path of gustatory wonders, I am the Reckless Gastronome, and I will guide you to where few are foolhardy enough to follow. My last couple articles have been a bit on the long side, so I will strive to keep this one on topic (not my strong suit.) So how did anyone even think this was a good idea? I understand the loose concept that a lot of companies make products that are less designed to actually sell and more for generating conversations about their products (I’m looking at you Thanksgiving Pizza.) For this one, there is an ad campaign featuring Jason Biggs. For those who don’t remember he starred in a movie called American Pie and not to spoil a movie from 1999, but he has a rather unique (or so I really hope) relationship with an apple pie.

On the surface, the idea of macaroni and cheese mixed with apple pie sounds heinous, but I try to reason out why someone would think to combine such things. Mainly I do this so I don’t freak myself out and so I can keep an open mind before casting judgement. Cheese and apples are frequently served together on cheese boards. Apple pie and cheese also have a long-standing relationship, especially in the North-East. American poet, Eugene Field wrote in the 19^th century “But I, when I undress me / Each night, upon my knees / Will ask the Lord to bless me / With apple pie and cheese.” I myself, have even tried my hand at baking a pie with cheese in the crust after being inspired by the cancelled too soon television show “Pushing Daisies” (Ned made an Apple-Gruyere Pie.) This is my one exception to the rule that while everyone should know how to make a basic pie crust, once you’ve done it, you really shouldn’t bother doing it again unless you are planning on adding something special (same is true of making butter.) A food factory gives you the same result for a similar price and without the misery of cleaning up after. It was so successful that I tried it again with smoked apples. While I liked it, the world was not ready for my genius and thus my pie making career was also cancelled too soon (my rivalry with Strawberry Shortcake didn’t help.) The pairing is so iconic that Vermont even codified it into law stating that apple pie should be served with either a glass of milk, a slice of cheddar weighing at least half an ounce, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Cheese and apple pie, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!

Now that I’ve made my impassioned defense of the concept, does it actually work as a flavor? There are a lot of processes that happen before we taste our food. For the most part we first taste with our eyes. Obviously, that’s not literal (DO NOT put food into your eyes) and I also don’t mean things like onions that make your eyes water, but rather that how we perceive food can and does influence how we think it will taste. There are no visual cues that this is anything other than a traditional macaroni and cheese. There are no flecks of cinnamon, nor even a hint of apple pieces. Nothing that hints that things are not as they appear. That is until you smell it. The scent of cinnamon is strong. The apple is somewhat detectable, but more as an afterthought.  The cognitive dissonance in preparing food that smells nothing like how it looks is somewhat off-putting. If I hadn’t known what I was doing I would have thought I had a traumatic brain injury event. Thank the stars that Kraft went with a green box instead of their traditional blue. We finally return to my initial question about its taste. Oh. Oh no. I fear I’ve wasted everyone’s time and good will. It tastes like nothing. My first thought was, did I somehow manage to catch COVID between cooking and plating? I urinated on the stick and it came back as negative (I may have grabbed the wrong test), but there is almost no flavor. I checked the box, it says mac and cheese, the ingredients say cheese, but you can taste no cheese. The apple and cinnamon fair no better, they only show up as the slightest after taste. What happened? Is there some cosmic force that caused them to neutralize each other? Did the macaroni (that’s the plural by the way, the singular is macarono) become tiny wormholes that teleported the flavor to another dimension? Did I somehow screw up boxed mac and cheese, a dish that serves as many children’s first foray into cooking?

Plagued with self-doubt, I questioned everything. Do we truly experience reality or are we trapped by the limitations of our perceptions, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? If the universe is truly infinite, then how can it be considered to be expanding? What if C-A-T really spelled dog? And most relevantly, are the instructions on the box, somehow wrong? Accepted wisdom for making pasta of any sort is that the water should be “as salty as the sea.”

Seasoning the water improves texture by breaking down the starches, adds flavor, and even can reduce cook time. The Kraft company offers no guidance on this issue, the box just says boil the water, and their website doesn’t even mention it. Teach the controversy! I reached out to their customer service, but I’m far too impatient to wait for a replay so, I did the next best thing, and prepared a second box but this time with salted water. The result is underwhelming. It’s certainly better, but not by a lot. It now tastes like weak mac and cheese (the cheese finally showed up) with a slightly cinnamon aftertaste. The apple is now unnoticeable reduced to naught but a whiff. Wait, does existential crisis count as a flavor? It has that in spades.

I’m sorry my friends (if I am even worthy of that consideration), I feel like I’ve let you down. Kraft Apple Pie Mac & Cheese had a lot of promise, but it committed a sin greater than being bad, it was bland. So, unless you feel like questioning the nature of reality, I’d say let this one pass on by.

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