I tried making an American mac and cheese recipe that's the 'most popular of all time'

Warm and gooey fresh from the oven, who can say no to ? There are countless different ways to make it, but whatever your preference, it's nice to tuck into just about any homemade mac and cheese.

No surprise then that one version is the most popular recipe of all time in The New York Times' Cooking section. It has a mostly hands-off approach, with interestingly no boiling required. The has the pasta 'cook' in the oven in a mix of dairy products, and though sceptical and loyal to a recipe I've been making for 14 years, I was curious to try it out.

You would think a wildly popular recipe with a five-star rating from over 16,400 reviews would be quick and easy, but this is most definitely not quick. The tradeoff for not boiling pasta is baking the dish for an hour.

But it is easy - it doesn't require making a roux like my go-to recipe does. The most time-consuming part is grating the mound of cheese required.

Neither does it dirty many dishes. At most, you will wash up a chopping board, a hand blender, and the bowl used to blend the cottage cheese, milk, dry mustard, cayenne, and nutmeg.

Marry the dairy mixture, cheese, and pasta in a foil-covered baking dish that you stir once midway through before removing the foil and sprinkling a bit of cheese reserved for this step.

Having accepted the 60-minute baking time in exchange for the easy prep, I was excited to see if this all-time popular mac and cheese lived up to the hype.

The cheese on top created a nicely bronzed crunchy layer. A note: the picture makes it look darker than it was.

The part I was most sceptical about - baking but not boiling pasta - turned out absolutely fine.

But it wasn't very good. Perhaps some recipes aren't transatlantic and cheddar in the UK is a bit different, as the sauce was embedded with lumps my husband aptly said was like "eating roast scrambled eggs".

Reading the recipe over, I checked to see if it was down to user error, but I followed it to the T. Noting a shopping mistake on my part, I had even swapped out one of the blocks of cheese pictured (a non-mature cheddar) for a mature block of Cathedral City.

It's certainly possible that there were some errant unblended cottage cheese curds, and the dairy mix could have been blended even more.

The answer always lies in the comments. The culprit could have been the semi-skimmed milk.

Seven years ago, a user called JN shared: "To make it less 'grainy' you need 'fats.' I've seen this made on another cooking show and they talked about it. You need to use half and half. Not 2 percent milk. I know it is decadent, but this is what creates the 'creamy' consistency you all crave. Up your fats in your dairy."

When it comes to mac and cheese, maybe more is more.