Mauer: Ditch the blue box for this tasty, low-carb take on mac & cheese

Who doesn't love macaroni and cheese?

For years, that mac and cheese in the blue box was a secret personal pleasure. It wasn't great, but it came together quickly and required little effort.

I've got a from-scratch, low-fat macaroni and cheese in one of my cookbooks, and most people can't tell the difference between it and the high-fat version.

That all works well until everyone — including me — started cutting sugars, high-carb veggies (like potatoes), wheat-based products and highly processed carbohydrates out of their food plans.

A single serving of macaroni (2 ounces dry) delivers 42.6 grams of carbohydrate. Uh-oh.

Recently, I started seeing all sorts of dishes folks are making from raw cauliflower, such as pizza crust and mac and cheese. Why? When it comes to carbs, ounce-for-ounce, cauliflower beats macaroni by a mile: 2 ounces of raw cauliflower delivers only 2.8 carb grams. No wonder folks are abandoning macaroni and cheese.

Adding insult to injury, classic mac and cheese has a breadcrumb crust that piles on even more carbs.

Believing there may be a way to duplicate a classic mac and cheese while trimming the carbs, I headed for my kitchen.

Since some fats, like olive oil, are supposed to be our healthy friends, I figured out a way to make a classic mac and cheese that duplicates its look, taste and even texture while minimizing carbs.

Properly cooked cauliflower could make a nearly perfect, low-carb macaroni substitute. If you've ever cooked cauliflower in water, you know how wet it gets and how it turns a cheese sauce into a thin cheese soup.

My new path: roasting cauliflower in a hot oven to cook and caramelize it, and to give the flavor a positive bump. Oven roasting cauliflower also wrings out a lot of the moisture, which should keep it from watering down the cheese sauce.

Next, most macaroni and cheese sauces are made from a roux (flour browned in butter or oil and then mixed with milk). Heavy whipping cream contains nearly no carbs (0.4 grams per tablespoon), making it a perfect candidate to be a cheese sauce base.

To give my sauce big flavor, I went with a blend of cheeses, including mild and sharp cheddar, plus mozzarella. I would have used a whole milk mozzarella, which melts beautifully, but that's hard to find. A standard mozzarella would work if I could get it to melt and not be stringy. Sodium citrate would do that but who, besides me, has sodium citrate in their pantry? I added two slices of American processed cheese food — it contains sodium citrate, so it melts perfectly.

To keep the breadcrumb topping from being an issue, I used baked pork rinds. I'd used crushed, baked pork rinds to make a most-excellent oven-fried chicken, so why not top my mac and cheese with them as well? To make it even crustier, I blended the pork rinds with shredded Parmesan cheese and a little olive oil.

My new, low-carb mac and cheese looked just like the real thing when I baked it. I took it to a dinner party and didn't say anything about it simply to see what would happen. By dinner's end, my no mac and cheese had disappeared. The casserole was, edge-to-edge, empty. They loved it, and so will you.