I don’t think I’ve ever been as surprised as when I took the first bite of John Legend’s Macaroni and Cheese. See, I didn’t really even know if John Legend could cook and after seeing the method for his recipe, I was even less sure, so I was not expecting much here. But his Macaroni and Cheese recipe turns out to be amazing. Like amazing enough that it might have inspired me to change up my mac and cheese game after making the same recipe over and over for the last twenty years. That amazing.

We made this mac and cheese as a part of our Celebrity Mac and Cheese Recipe Showdown. It’s a fun thing where we take four celebrity recipes — some celebrity chefs, some not so much — cook them, and then taste and compare them to see how they stack up. This match-up included Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, John Legend, and Patti LaBelle. They were all very different and delicious in their own right.

Chef Dom made two of the recipes and I made the other two. While Chef Dom was working on this one, I was honestly thinking, what is happening?! because I had never seen a mac and cheese made like this before. See, I’ve always made bechamel-based mac and cheeses but John Legend’s uses an interesting layering technique.

He has you cook the macaroni and then drain it and toss it with a stick of butter while you heat up evaporated milk, skim milk, and eggs in a pan that you season with seasoned salt, garlic powder, and salt and pepper. The seasoned salt, the butter tossed with the noodles, the sauce with evaporated milk and eggs but no cheese was all new to me. And I definitely wasn’t sure how it would come together.

Here’s how:

You layer the buttered macaroni with the cheese (which is a combo of extra sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack) and you pour that evaporated milk/egg mixture over the whole thing.

And then you top it with paprika. And you bake it, of course.

I was wondering the whole time how the cheese would actually combine with the sauce and if it would really taste like a cohesive mac and cheese. It did all of that and more.

Of all the mac and cheeses we made that day, this was by far our favorite. It was perfectly creamy, had plenty of cheese pulls, and actually tasted like cheese. Nothing else overshadowed that cheese flavor… that was the star here, along with the consistency. And while it might look a little liquidy in our photos, I can promise you that if you let it sit long enough, the consistency is delightful. But sometimes with food photography you have to strike while the iron is hot, literally!

To see how this stacked up with the other celebrity mac and cheeses, see our Celebrity Mac and Cheese Recipe Showdown article!