Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Ellen Bass and I'm here with my niece Sophia Conn. We're from Students Go Gourmet and today we're going to be cooking you a delicious ham, cheese and corn bake similar to mac and cheese. So what we have here first in the pan, I've got eight ounces of chopped pancetta and I've got two scallions sauteing. They've been sauteing for about ten minutes until they are nice and caramelized. Then I'm going to be adding to them pepper, salt and some ground sage and then we are going to make a bechamel sauce, a classic sauce for a mac and cheese which is a bechamel that becomes a Mornay. So I've got four cups of milk. I've got two tablespoons of both flour and butter. We've got three cups of Gruyere which is a wonderful melting cheese. We've got a half a cup of mascarpone cheese and a half a cup of Parmesan. Then we've got two cups of corn here and then we've got our penne which we've cooked over here in a nice big bowl and then we're going to top it with some beautiful havarti cheese at the end and put it in the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes. So I'm just going to add my pepper here to my pancetta. It gives it a nice little bit of heat, a little bit of salt, not too much because the Italian bacon is salty. Okay now this is ready. You're going to let this cook for about a minute or two and then you're done. So I'm going to start on our bechamel sauce. I'm just going to switch out and there we go. We're going to get this guy fired up and we're going to start our bechamel sauce. We're putting in butter first, butter, we're going to let it melt. We're making a roux, equal parts of butter and flour, okay our butter is melting, I'm going to add the flour and we're going to let that cook for a couple of minutes just to cook the flour taste out of that and then once we've done that and it's come together and it sort of looks like a paste and I'm going to show you on camera in a second and then we are going to add the milk and let it thicken. And the bechamel sauce is one of the French mother sauces. You can do so much with it. Yes indeed. We're actually going to throw it into a Mornay when we add the cheese. Okay now we're going to add our milk and we're going to switch to our whisk. It's a great blank canvas. I'm just going to put this with the corn. Because you can really infuse it with whatever flavors you like. Absolutely. Auntie actually loves to add nutmeg to it as well. It's a great for white sauce. I always add nutmeg to a white sauce. I usually add this in one or two or sometimes three depending on how much milk I have or cream. Nutmeg is also great because it's an aphrodisiac. It's native to the Spice Islands and it's really healthy for you as well. It's one of the super foods. So it's great to get a little bit in there. It is a super food indeed, just a little bit though. Okay we're going to bring this up to a boil because you need to come to a boil to get the flours full thickening power and then once it comes to a boil we're going to bring it down to medium low and we're going to cook for about eight to ten minutes until the sauce is thick. And since I love nutmeg so much, I am going to just do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight around the merry go round, beautiful. It's nice and thick. Gorgeous. We're just about ready to add our cheeses. And it becomes a Mornay. Here's some of our Parmesan. It's graduated to the next level of French mother sauce already. We've got lots of beautiful Gruyere for this, beautiful melting French cheese. It's a French Swiss cheese. It's very similar to emmental as well. Yes it is. It's got a nice nutty, woody flavor to it. Okay while that's melting, I'm going to bring over our pancetta and I'm going to put it in with the corn. So we're going to take turns, here actually why don't, I'm going to turn our friend here off and I'm going to pour the cheese sauce right over our pasta. We're going to add our corn, our pancetta and our shallots. We've got some sage in here. It's a really nice Fall dish. We're going to mix it all together. Here if you bring that over here Sophia, that would be terrific. Get this rogue onion out of the way. And again we're going to put it in the oven at 350 degrees. Look how gorgeous that is, for about 30 to 40 minutes. And you're going to get a little bit of the pancetta and the corn and everything in every bite. It's really well distributed. Beautiful. And there we go. Okay and then we're just going to level this out for you, make it look nice and pretty and put some cheese on top here that's going to melt and add some flavor as well as beauty. Make it nice and brown and crispy on the top once it's, and put it in the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes. And you're all set. I hope you try this at home.