Sauce Béchamel

Milk, flour, butter, and just a little bit of flavor make a delicate, creamy smooth sauce. Taken a little further, you can make the best macaroni & cheese, sausage gravy, or chocolate soufflé you've ever had.

Sauce Béchamel is one of the five "mother sauces" from classical French cooking. It is almost never served as a sauce by itself, but it's the base for cheese sauce, gives creaminess and body to your Italian grandmother's best lasagna recipe, or it can be flavored with a little bit of mustard to make steamed cauliflower positively stand up and sing.

Relevant Previous Lessons

1. How to Boil Water

Mise en Place

Read the recipe. Assemble your ingredients and equipment. If you're planning to make a big batch for future fun, make sure you have the facilities and equipment to safely—i.e., quickly—cool and properly store what you cook. To Do: phrits to write up a Kitchen Safety 101 of some sort.

Ingredients

Quantity	Measurement	Ingredient	Notes
1	qt	whole milk	Lower fat milks work, but the texture won't be as smooth.
1/4	ea	small onion
1	ea	clove
1	ea	bay leaf
1/8	tsp	ground nutmeg	Fresh grated is even better. Just a small pinch either way.
2	oz	flour	by weight
2	oz	clarified butter	by weight. Whole butter works, but it's about 20% water, so adjust acordingly. Precision is not hugely important here.
		salt & white pepper	to taste. Black pepper would taste fine, but you'd have dark specks in an otherwise perfectly white sauce.

Cooking Methods and Techniques

• Simmer
• Make a Roux

Equipment

• sauce pot
• sauce pan or another sauce pot big enough to mix and cook less than a cup of roux.
• whisk (a.k.a. whip)

Instructions

1. Use the clove to pin the bay leaf to the piece of onion. Put the pinned onion, the milk, and the nutmeg into a sauce pot.
2. Put the pot on the stove over medium to medium-high heat. Stir occasionally and watch for small bubbles to appear around the edges of the pot. Try not to let it come to a full boil, as it will be a frothy mess all over your stove.
3. Allow to simmer for half an hour or so, until it has been reduced by a little bit.
4. While the milk is reducing, make the roux. Over high heat (or a little lower, if you like), mix the clarified butter and the flour. Whisk frequently, allowing the flour to cook in the fat. Your sense of smell is important here, and you're looking for the aroma of fresh bread. If you smell toast, stop; you've gone far enough. A darker roux might add more depth of flavor, but for Béchamel, a white color is more important.
5. Take the milk off the heat and allow it to sit for a moment. Remove the onion, clove, and bay leaf. If you'd like, you can strain the liquid through a chinois or cheesecloth.
6. Slowly whisk in the roux. Return to the heat and turn it up somewhat. Whisk very frequently until it comes almost to a full boil at which point the thickener will be at its maximum strength.
7. Season delicately with salt and white pepper. Serve or cool, label, and store.

Cleanup

Nothing special. Wash, dry, and put away the pots and utensils. Any leftover sauce should be cooled, labeled and refrigerated. Freezing may be okay, but it's probably not recommended if the texture is going to be important later. If you're going to thaw it for use in lasagna, for example, it should be fine.

Lessons and Notes

When we brought water to a boil in How to Boil Water, we put the pot on high heat. For the Béchamel, we used a lower setting. The reason is that milk is a very complex mixture, and too much heat all at once might have scorched the milk solids near the bottom of the pot.

A classic roux has a 1:1 ratio, by weight, of fat to flour. If you're using an impure fat—whole butter instead of clarified, for example— or you don't have a scale for precise measurement, you're still okay. You should have enough flour in your fat that you don't see oil leaking out of the mixture, but beyond that it's largely a matter of personal preference. It's the flour that actually does the thickening, and depending on what else is going on, the fat might eventually be skimmed and discarded.

 

Where to Go From Here

Macaroni & cheese. Into about a quart of Béchamel, slowly whisk in a pound of grated cheese. Mix most of that with a pound (weighed before cooking) of slightly undercooked macaroni. Put the mixture into a buttered casserole dish. Pour whatever you held back with "most of" above evenly over the top. Sprinkle with a little more cheese and some bread crumbs. Bake at 350°F/175°C for 40 to 60 minutes until it's nicely browned on top. Let it rest for a few minutes before serving. You can turn this into a one-dish meal with chopped (maybe blanched) vegetables and hunks of chicken or browned sausage or ground beef.

Sausage Gravy. Mix up the order of ingredients a little bit. Brown and drain some sausage, saving a few tablespoons of the fat. Return the pan and the reserved pan to the heat, then whisk in some flour, creating a roux. Slowly whisk in milk until the gravy reaches the thickness you want. Add salt and black pepper to taste—add another 1/4 cup of pepper for a real treat!—then serve over biscuits, toast, pancakes, or even more sausage.

Making a soufflé is enough to hold back for a future lesson, but if you already know your way around a kitchen somewhat, don't wait. A soufflé is essentially an extra-thick Béchamel, leavened with eggs, flavored with whatever you like.

Now that you can make a roux, you can thicken a "cream" soup. Or gravy. Or the espagnole you need for the demi-glace on the way to Sauce Bigerade (with an orange gastrique and goes very nicely with beef). Or the deep dark base for a Cajun gumbo. The darker a roux is, the more of that toasty flavor it will have, but the less effectively it will thicken. Also don't forget the carryover effect: Your roux-in-progress will continue to cook a little bit after you remove it from the heat, so give yourself some room for error. A burned roux is bitter and unpleasant.

©2010 Analytical Life. All rights reserved except as licensed to the commons.