In Which I Eat The Food Crime Known As Kraft Apple Pie Mac & Cheese

You may have heard the news — and if not, you may have felt it in your bones, a paroxysm of worry squirming in your marrow like worms — that Kraft put out an apple pie mac and cheese. And of course, for those who somehow don’t know, I’m the Chief Captain Scout Leader, aka, The Apple Man, of the Apple Snack Gang, whereupon I eat apples and apple-related things and then post about them here and on Instagram. So it was of course grotesque kismet that I would end up eating this fucking thing in front of you, digitally, so to speak.

Food Crime Mukbang, baby.

I have done this in a two part video, if you wanna watch —

Part One

Part Two

— but if you’re one of those weirdos who, you know, still reads things, I note first that a) bless you and b) you can just read what I’m about to write.

My review of this shit is this:

It smelled fairly strongly of apple pie spice, but not apple pie. I am of the mind that many apple-flavored things are apple-flavored in the same way that pumpkin spice is a thing — the apple-flavor contains no apple, the pumpkin spice contains no pumpkin. They’re just flavored with their respective spice blends, and those blends are honestly pretty similar. The smell coming off this Kraft mac was cinnamon and nutmeg-forward, with zero apple anything.

Oh, and it smelled a little barfy.

Not hella-barfy!

But a little barfy, like how some products cooked in coconut oil smell or taste that way after they sit too long. (Rancidity, man. Rancidity.)

I ate it.

And it was–

Okay, listen, I expected it was going to go one of two ways. The first was that it was going to be an absolute atrocity inside my mouth, a food crime punishable by exile in a cosmic prison beyond the veil of space and the walls of time — a spoonful of nightmare. Or, alternatively, that it was going to be really fucking dull.

I would’ve preferred the Mouth Atrocity.

Unfortunately, I got Fucking Dull.

It was boring!

The potpourri smell mostly disappears into the food. It gives only a faint hint of autumnal spice in the mac and chee, which is, y’know, fine. It’s nothing to hurk up, it’s nothing to cheer about. It’s just food. In your mouth.

(It must be noted that one of the things Kraft gets right, always, about their mac and chee — those soft little noodle-tubes are deeply, deeply comforting. Texturally they’re a wonder — barely any texture at all, just a soft, acquiescent bundle of not-quite-goo in your mouth, less pasta and more those wiggly tube things you’d win at an arcade, the ones that look like water-filled double-anuses and you let them slip and slide in your hand? You know what I mean? You know what I mean. Anyway, point is: you barely even need to chew Kraft mac and cheese. It’s present! You can tell it’s there. But it begs little of you. It asks almost nothing, demands no work, and loves you for who you are.)

So, this was completely unexceptional and uninteresting in every way.

But I really wanted to try to get closer to… well, what it said on the box. APPLE PIE. Like, where’s the crime part of this food crime? I wanted to at least get closer to the intent of the thing.

As such, I got out my applesauce.

I make a pretty solid applesauce — it’s easy, and delicious, and here’s how you do it: chop up as many apples as you want. Keep the skins on maybe half of them? Only red ones. You want that red, rosy color. Pour some apple cider (non-alc) over them, ideally something from a local orchard or farm. Like, a half-cup, maybe a cup if you’re cooking a bunch of apples.

Simmer, cover for 20 minutes until apples are mushy.

Blend them up — you can just mash, but in that case, peel all the skins to start.

Then return the apple goo, now blended, to the pot, and now add:

Cinnamon, nutmeg. Cinnamon to taste, nutmeg just a heavy pinch.

Cook on low for another… at least 20 minutes, maybe 30, maybe more. Stir semi-often. I cover the pot back up for the first part of this but then leave uncovered for most of the time.

It reduces down to this delicious goo. It’s shy of apple butter — but has a velvety texture, and you’ve added no additional sugar.

Anyway.

I took a heaping spoonful of my applesauce —

And plopped it into the mac and cheese.

Mixy-mixy.

Then I ate it.

And — no food crime here, my friends. ONLY FOOD MIRACLE. Holy fuck it was tasty. You know how sometimes when you were a kid (or an adult still shut up) and you squirt ketchup into pasta or mac and cheese and you’re like “This is gross but also amazing?” This is that. It’s maybe gross, I dunno, but it was super tasty. It added this sweet-tart appley snap to the mac and cheese and upped the comfort level, upped the nostalgia level, and gave it an actual apple pie vibe.

So, do that.

And in fact, turns out this is a thing — älplermagronen is a Swiss-German dish where mac and cheese (tubule mac and cheese too) is paired with, often, bacon, onion, and potato and then on the side you get applesauce or apple compote to mix in for taste. Warm and comforting and yum.

Anyway.

To sum up:

I ate the food crime and it wasn’t much of a food crime but then I made it into a food crime that simply corrected the injustice of boring food, the end.