This Is Your Sign to Add Tomatoes to Your Mac and Cheese

Use tomato to give your mac and cheese its standout flavor.

Of all the ingredients that get added to macaroni and cheese, few have as successful a track record as tomato. America's Test Kitchen/TCA

Tomato started showing up in mac and cheese on menus at about the turn of the 20th century and continued to appear regularly in cookbooks throughout the 1950s. Recently, the combination has fallen off the radar, but we hoped to revive this once-popular recipe.

To pack in bright tomato flavor, we tried every type of tomato product we could think of—even ketchup and jarred tomato sauce—as we struggled to find the perfect balance of rich red color and bright tomato flavor. In the end, testers preferred canned petite diced tomatoes. But no matter how much tomato we piled into our macaroni, the tomato flavor just wasn’t strong enough.