How Are People Screwing Up Chef Tini Younger’s Very Easy Mac and Cheese Recipe?

The holidays call for family feasts, and everyone wants to bring the killer side dish that the table can’t stop raving about. Mac and cheese is a natural crowd-pleaser: hearty, homey, vegetarian, and — crucially — hard to mess up. Sure, we can have our disagreements about the little touches that elevate a tray of mac from merely good to great, but as long as you’re serving cheesy noodles, you shouldn’t be hearing any complaints.

Or so you’d hope. But with Thanksgiving just around the corner, some home cooks attempting a viral mac and cheese recipe from content creator and chef Tineke “Tini” Younger, a former contestant on Next Level Chef, are finding it beyond their culinary abilities. After she re-promoted the recipe on her social feeds, including a TikTok account with nearly 10 million followers, the app saw a surge of videos of botched macaroni from amateur cooks who supposedly followed her instructions.

The appeal of Younger’s recipe is obvious: it calls for a whopping 2.5 pounds of fresh shredded cheeses (mozzarella, Colby Jack, and sharp cheddar), advises cavatappi (corkscrew) pasta so that the melty cream sauce gets into the noodles, and comes out of the oven with an Instagram-worthy crust (if properly executed, that is). It appears, however, that the popularity and relative simplicity of the recipe may account for the trend of failures. Not only are less experienced chefs likely to attempt the dish, others may ruin it by adding extra ingredients or otherwise modifying Younger’s concept.

A few seem to have been thwarted by the most technical step of the recipe: mixing a roux over the stove to thicken the cheese sauce. Burning the roux by setting the heat too high or leaving it on too long presumably accounts for some of the unappetizingly dark noodles that showed up on TikTok (though allegedly this didn’t affect the taste too much). A different user’s sauce turned out clotted and white, leading a commenter to theorize that they had curdled the evaporated milk in the recipe by pouring it in cold from the refrigerator.

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In one TikTok ridiculed by countless users, two young women say that Younger’s mac and cheese is the worst they’ve ever had. They had topped it with a dense layer of Ritz cracker crumbs — Younger has advocated against using crumb toppings at all — and claim that the ingredients cost $147 altogether. Younger herself responded by commenting, “It’s a step by step video.” The women who made the video followed up with a TikTok claiming the clip was “satire,” though many doubted this and accused them of “backtracking” from their earlier comments. The exchanges only added to the confused discourse around Younger’s recipe.

All the unsuccessful macaroni blamed on Younger eventually prompted home chefs to post videos bragging about how they had made it correctly (“POV: your Tinis mac and Cheese is actually edible because you can follow instructions,” read one sarcastic caption). Another creator parodied the TikToks of people blaming Younger for their kitchen woes, posing with a baking dish of uncooked pasta covered in flour.

Meanwhile, a separate debate erupted among Black TikTokers, some of whom questioned why a white woman had gone viral with a recipe for a staple among Black family meals. A few of Younger’s signature touches, including a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, were dismissed by critics who said mac and cheese didn’t need a reinvention — though just as many Black users argued that her personal preferences were nothing to get worked up about. Some were even inspired to try Younger’s version for themselves. “Made Tini’s Mac and cheese for Friendsgiving cuz black twitter was cancelling her for repackaging our ancestors recipes and tryna sell it back to us so I just KNEW it had to be damn good,” read the caption on a viral TikTok of a young man taking his tray of macaroni out of the oven.

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As it happens, Younger got married a week and a half ago, to Antoine Wright, a rapper who goes by the artist name Twon Brady. (He can be seen enjoying her mac and cheese at the end of the instructional video, saying, “This one breaks the scale, infinite out of ten.”) Presumably, she didn’t want to spend much of her honeymoon period embroiled in online drama, though she did briefly acknowledge it.

“We need to leave Tini out of this Mac n cheese drama she just got married and it’s literally pasta and cheese,” she labeled a TikTok shortly after her wedding — the text changing to “Whoops” when she switches to the forward-facing phone camera and reveals her own face instead of someone else defending her. In a later video, she clapped back at any commenter saying “That’s not how my mom makes it, so it’s wrong” with an audio sample of a woman saying “I don’t really give a shit what your mother did.” (The caption below reads, “Eat your moms food then!!”)

Such are the tribulations of a chef influencer. But Younger’s macaroni and cheese, at least, has already vanquished many doubters to become a holiday favorite far and wide. To those who struggled with it, don’t worry — there’s always next year.