Mac And Cheese Is 10x More Flavorful When You Add This Tangy Canned Soup

Tomato soup is no stranger to cheesy pairings. After all, there's an actual history behind eating grilled cheese with tomato soup, arguably the soup's most famous companion. But it has its uses in other cheesy dishes, too. Stirring some into mac and cheese, for example, can give the dish a much more tangy and rich flavor, which isn't that novel of a concept.

There are recipes for tomato soup mac and cheese floating around online, which suggest this combination already has a place in American comfort food cooking. Some recipes add condensed tomato soup directly into the sauce alongside milk and cheese, while others add the pasta to the soup before mixing in the cheese. Whatever way you do it, the goal is to create a tomato-cheese sauce.

There are also Reddit threads where people swear by adding the soup to the pasta cooking water, which gives the noodles a subtle tomato flavor as they cook. The concept of putting tomato soup in pasta water might feel a bit like a crime to any of your Italian relatives, but it works (although it runs the risk of making your pasta soggy).

It doesn't matter whether you're making the easiest three-ingredient mac and cheese with Kraft singles or you're making your own roux for the cheesy base, the reason adding tomato soup works remains the same: Rich, creamy mac and cheese is balanced out with something as acidic and slightly sweet as tomato soup. In fact, this common tomato-and-cheese flavor logic applies to many dishes. The aforementioned tomato soup with grilled cheese, for example, works because the sharpness of the tomato keeps the richness of the cheese from becoming too heavy. Similarly, think about how we drunk mozzarella sticks into marinara sauce. Canned tomato soup has a concentrated tomato flavor that makes it an easy way to add that balance without having to do much work yourself.

Once you have the tomato-cheese base, you can keep mixing things up. Add in a little mustard for kick, smoked paprika for smokiness, or, if you like the idea of spicy tomato mac and cheese, lean into the flavors of arrabbiata with plenty of chile and garlic. For something completely different, take the sauce in a Korean direction by making a kimchi mac and cheese, where you use the tomato soup as the base and add a spoonful of gochujang for a more concentrated sweet heat.