Noodles & Company built its entire reputation on the Wisconsin Mac. It’s been on the menu since the restaurant opened its first location in Cherry Creek, Denver, in October 1995 — and while the chain now has pasta dishes from seven global traditions, the Wisconsin Mac is the one people order when they don’t know what else to get.
What makes it work is not complexity. It’s a stovetop cream sauce with two cheeses over elbow macaroni. No baking, no breadcrumbs, no unusual ingredients. The techniques that separate it from bad mac are very specific and very learnable.
TL;DR: Make a butter-flour roux, slowly add whole milk and heavy cream, whisk until thick, pull completely off heat, add dry mustard, then stir in freshly grated sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack in batches. Toss with cooked elbow macaroni. Finish with shredded cheddar on top. The two rules that matter: use block cheese (not pre-shredded), and take the pan entirely off the heat before the cheese goes in.
The Pasta: Elbow Macaroni, Not Cavatappi
This is the most common error in Wisconsin Mac copycat recipes. Noodles & Company uses standard elbow macaroni. The restaurant does serve cavatappi — but in their Pesto Cavatappi, not in the Wisconsin Mac. The confusion probably comes from the brand’s general association with the corkscrew shape, but the Wisconsin Mac has always been elbow.
This matters for more than accuracy. The elbow’s hollow center traps sauce inside each piece while the curved exterior holds sauce on the outside. You get a double-coating on every bite. A larger shape like cavatappi can overpower the sauce-to-pasta ratio, leaving you with a dish that tastes noodle-heavy rather than cheese-forward.
If you have cavatappi and want to use it, go ahead — the sauce will work. But if you’re after the restaurant version, use elbow macaroni.
Cooking the Pasta Right
Two points that matter:
Salt the water properly. The single most impactful upgrade in home pasta cooking. The water should taste lightly seasoned when you sip it — that’s roughly 1 tablespoon of kosher salt per quart of water, or about 4 tablespoons for a large pot. The pasta absorbs sodium during cooking; under-salted pasta tastes flat even in a well-seasoned sauce.
Reserve the pasta water. Before you drain, scoop out at least a cup of the cloudy cooking water. The dissolved starch in pasta water is a natural emulsifier and thinner — it loosens thick cheese sauce without watering it down and helps the sauce cling to the pasta. You may not need it, but you will need it if the sauce tightens up during combining.
The “Wisconsin” — What the Name Actually Means
Noodles & Company’s second location ever opened in Madison, Wisconsin, in March 1996 — just five months after the first Denver store. The Wisconsin market was where the chain proved it could survive outside its home state, and the dish was named to honor Wisconsin’s dairy identity and that early history.
Wisconsin produces more than 25% of all cheese made in the United States. It’s the leading cheese-producing state in the country. Cheddar and Colby (a close relative of Monterey Jack) are its flagship products — the two cheeses in this dish. The “Wisconsin Mac” name is a signal that the dish is built around real aged cheese, not processed cheese product or mild, pre-melted blends.
In January 2024, Noodles & Company enhanced the dish with 50% more cheese sauce per bowl — announced as a Valentine’s Day-adjacent promotion but retained permanently as a product upgrade.
The Cheese: Why These Two and Not Others
The sauce calls for two cheeses for a specific reason: sharp cheddar provides the flavor, and Monterey Jack provides the melt.
Sharp (aged) cheddar has the complex, tangy, slightly grassy flavor that makes cheese sauce taste like something. Mild cheddar has fat and melting properties without the flavor payoff. The restaurant uses “premium aged cheddars” — plural, and aged. Use the sharpest white or yellow cheddar your grocery store carries.
Monterey Jack is a mild, semi-firm cheese with excellent melting properties. It stretches cleanly without breaking and doesn’t have strong flavor that would compete with the cheddar. The jack essentially functions as a stretchy, creamy binder — it makes the sauce pull and coat rather than breaking into clumps.
Always Grate Your Own
Buy blocks and grate them yourself. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with cellulose or potato starch to keep it from clumping in the bag. Those anti-caking agents prevent the cheese from melting smoothly — they remain in the sauce as fine particles and create a grainy, slightly starchy texture.
Freshly grated block cheese, added off heat to a smooth bechamel, melts into a glossy emulsion. The difference is significant enough that you can taste it. A box grater takes about two minutes for the full amount called for in this recipe.
Building the Roux: The Foundation of the Sauce
A roux is a cooked mixture of equal parts fat and flour that thickens sauces. It sounds technical; it is not.
Why equal parts? Three tablespoons of butter and three tablespoons of flour by volume — the butter coats the starch granules in the flour, which prevents lumps from forming when liquid is added. Melt the butter fully before adding the flour, add the flour all at once, and whisk immediately.
How long to cook it? One and a half to two minutes over medium heat, whisking constantly. You want a pale golden color — slightly past white. White roux (undercooked) leaves a raw, starchy aftertaste in the finished sauce. Slightly golden roux has the starchy flavor cooked out but hasn’t developed the nuttier, more complex notes of a brown roux (which would add unwanted color and flavor here).
The liquid addition sequence: Add milk slowly — about a quarter cup at a time — whisking fully between each addition. If you pour in all the liquid at once, the roux clumps before it disperses. The slow-add method lets the roux absorb and disperse before it can cook into lumps. Once all the milk is in and smooth, the cream can go in all at once.
Dry Mustard: The Actual Secret Ingredient
The stub recipe for this dish uses nutmeg. Nutmeg is from traditional French Mornay sauce — it’s not in Noodles & Company’s Wisconsin Mac and it doesn’t belong here.
The right secret ingredient is dry mustard powder.
Here is what it does: mustard compounds — primarily allyl isothiocyanates — interact chemically with the flavor molecules in aged cheddar, amplifying the cheese’s sharpness and depth without adding an identifiable mustard flavor. At the amount used here (1/2 teaspoon for the full recipe, or roughly 1/8 teaspoon per serving), you cannot taste mustard. What you taste is “more cheddar” and “more depth.”
Double the amount and you tip into identifiable mustard territory, which is wrong. Use too little and the effect is negligible. Half a teaspoon for 12 ounces of pasta is the right amount.
This technique comes from British cooking — Welsh Rarebit and classic British cheese sauce both use dry mustard the same way. It migrated into American mac and cheese through the same British culinary tradition. It’s the reason well-made restaurant mac tastes more complex than the same ingredients at home without it.
Add the dry mustard to the sauce while it’s still over low heat, whisk in, and let it simmer for one minute before pulling off the burner. This blooms the mustard into the sauce.
The Off-Heat Cheese Rule
This is not a suggestion. Remove the saucepan completely from the burner before adding any cheese.
Cheese proteins behave well at low temperatures and break under high heat. The fat-to-protein bond in cheese holds in a smooth emulsion up to around 150-160°F. Above that temperature, the proteins seize — they contract and squeeze out the fat rather than remaining dispersed through it. The result is a broken sauce: grainy curds of protein floating in a pool of yellowish fat.
The technique:
- Turn off the burner and move the pan completely off it (not just turned off — an electric burner holds heat for several minutes after shutoff).
- Let the sauce cool undisturbed for 30 seconds.
- Add the cheddar in three additions, stirring after each until fully melted before adding the next.
- Add the Monterey Jack in two additions.
The sauce should melt smoothly into something glossy and cohesive that flows rather than stretches. If it starts looking grainy, you added cheese too quickly or the pan was still too hot. You can sometimes rescue a broken sauce by whisking in a tablespoon of cream cheese off heat — cream cheese contains stabilizers that help rebind broken cheese emulsions.
Variations and Add-Ins
Buffalo Chicken Mac
Noodles & Company sells a Buffalo Chicken Mac as a menu variant. At home: cook and slice 1 chicken breast, toss with 3 tablespoons Frank’s RedHot and 1 tablespoon melted butter. Stir into the finished Wisconsin Mac base. Top with a drizzle of blue cheese dressing and sliced green onions. This is the restaurant’s most popular Mac variation.
BBQ Chicken Mac
Another restaurant variant: toss pulled chicken (or rotisserie chicken, pulled) with 3 tablespoons of smoky BBQ sauce. Stir into the finished base. Top with a light slaw or pickled red onion for acid contrast.
Caramelized Onion + Gruyere Upgrade
Replace 1/3 of the cheddar with Gruyere. Stir in 1/2 cup of slowly caramelized onions (take 30 minutes for this — low heat, no shortcuts) before adding the pasta. This moves the dish into a French onion mac territory that’s significantly more complex than the original.
Broccoli Mac (Restaurant-Style)
The restaurant serves steamed broccoli as an optional add-on inside the mac. Blanch 1 cup of broccoli florets for 2 minutes, drain, and stir in with the pasta. The broccoli acts as a structural counterpoint to the smooth sauce — you need some vegetable with enough body to hold up to tossing.
The Cheese On Top
The restaurant finishes every Wisconsin Mac bowl with a handful of shredded sharp cheddar on top of the hot mac. This is not decoration — it does something specific.
The cold shredded cheese on the hot pasta creates a small temperature contrast in the bowl. The top layer stays slightly fresher and more textured than the fully melted sauce underneath. You get two cheese experiences in one bite: the silky, integrated sauce underneath and the slightly firmer, more distinct shred on top.
Use 2 tablespoons of shredded sharp cheddar per serving. Add it at the moment of plating, not while the pasta is still in the saucepan.
Nutrition: Home vs. Restaurant
The Noodles & Company regular Wisconsin Mac (renamed “Creamy Cheddar Mac & Cheese” in the chain’s 2025 menu overhaul, though the restaurant’s own listing still notes it was “formerly known as Wisconsin Mac & Cheese” and that remains the dominant search term) runs approximately 980 calories, 38g fat, 119g carbs, and 42g protein per regular bowl. The small bowl is roughly 490 calories.
The home version, as written (4 servings from 12 oz pasta), runs approximately 840 calories per serving — slightly less than the restaurant’s regular bowl, which since the January 2024 upgrade contains 50% more cheese sauce than it previously did. At about $2 per serving in ingredients, versus $9 to $13 for a restaurant bowl depending on location, the cost difference is real.
The home version also has less sodium: approximately 780mg per serving versus roughly 1,000 to 1,100mg for the restaurant regular. The restaurant’s “real Wisconsin cheddar” marketing is accurate — they use Wisconsin-sourced cheddar in their sauce — but at commercial scale the sauce has a higher sodium baseline than a home-cooked version using the same cheeses.
Reheating: The Right Method
Mac and cheese sitting in the refrigerator overnight absorbs its own sauce — what went in as a creamy bowl comes out as a stiff, pasta-forward block. This is not a sign of bad cooking; it’s physics. The pasta continues to absorb liquid after cooking.
Stovetop method (correct): Add the leftover mac to a small saucepan with 2 to 3 tablespoons of whole milk per serving. Heat over medium-low, stirring frequently, until the sauce loosens and the mac is hot. The milk restores the sauce’s original consistency. Total time: 3 to 4 minutes.
Microwave method (acceptable): Add 1 tablespoon of milk per serving, cover the bowl with a plate or wrap, microwave in 45-second intervals, stirring between each. Three cycles usually suffices. The plate trap traps steam and prevents the top layer from drying out before the center is hot.
Refrigerated Wisconsin Mac keeps for 3 days. After that the pasta texture degrades beyond reheating’s ability to fix it.
More Mac and Cheese Recipes
If Wisconsin Mac is the benchmark, these are the other versions worth knowing:
- Chick-fil-A Mac and Cheese — a baked mac with a slightly firmer, creamier set. Chick-fil-A’s version uses Parmesan on top and gets a brief oven finish that Wisconsin Mac doesn’t.
- Applebee’s Four Cheese Mac and Cheese — a sweeter, more complex blend than Wisconsin Mac, with Gruyere providing the distinct sweetness.
- Boston Market Mac and Cheese — a stovetop-style mac that, like Wisconsin Mac, relies on processed-cheese science for its smooth, stable texture. A slightly different technique but the same principle.
- Capital Grille Lobster Mac and Cheese — the white-truffle-cream-sauce end of the mac spectrum. Expensive ingredients, different technique, dramatically different result.
- Cheesecake Factory Fried Mac and Cheese Bites — the leftover use case: day-old Wisconsin Mac chilled until firm, breaded, and deep-fried into a different thing entirely.
