Cookbook:Béchamel Sauce

Cookbook | Ingredients | Recipes

| Sauces

Béchamel is one of the five "mother sauces" in French cuisine. A basic white sauce, it can be used as the base of many other sauces.

Yield is 4 cups béchamel.

Ingredients

avoirdupois:

• ¼ cup unsalted butter
• ¼ cup white flour
• 4½ cups scalded whole milk > 3% milk fat

metric units:

• 50g butter
• 50g white wheat flour (type 405)
• 1000ml milk

And optional spices:

• salt
• pepper

or

• 1 small onion peeled & stuck with a clove
• 1 fresh bay laurel leaf

Procedure

1. Soften the unsalted butter and knead into the flour.
2. Cook the roux of butter and flour over gentle heat, but do not brown.
3. Test the roux as it should not have apparent flour taste.
4. Add milk to new pot
5. Peel the onion and stick with one clove.
6. Assemble into a scalding pot with one bay leaf.
7. Stir some more. Do not let the milk adhere and cook to pot bottom.
8. Keep stirring until milk is scalded at 80°C.
9. Remove cloved onion and bay leaf.
10. Combine scalded milk slowly into cooked roux.
11. Stir and cook for 15 minutes. No lumps should be present.

Variations

The first is for general all-purpose usage. The second is for desserts requiring a thickening. The third is for my signature lasagne ferrera. The fourth is for Atkins compliance. The last one lends a peculiar sweetness when made with a two-row brewers' malt.

Pure olive oils and virgin olive oils are somewhat orthodox. Vegetable oils and other oils are certainly outside orthodoxy.

1. butter & common white flour > 10% protein
2. butter & white rice flour
3. butter & semolina durum flour
4. butter & wheat gluten
5. butter & malted barley flour