The First French Mother Sauce

This is the moment we have all been waiting for. The first of the five French mother sauces, béchamel. Béchamel is an extremely simple sauce that can be made with minimal time required. This sauce pairs well with all sorts of pastas, fish, meat and poultry. We can also use this multifunctional sauce to create dozens of daughter sauces, from cheese sauce for a delicious homemade Mac and Cheese, to a beautiful onion laden sauce to drizzle over a fresh cooked piece of chicken.

I’m not going to give my life’s story here, so let’s get to cooking:

-Béchamel-

• 2 ounces(57g) of fresh blond roux

• 1 Cup of milk(warm or room temperature)

• Kosher Salt

• White Pepper

1) Make a blond roux, as per the instructions in my “It’s a Roux" recipe. Keep the heat to medium/medium low.

2) Slowly incorporate the milk into your roux stirring to fully mix your milk and roux together, and eliminate lumps.

3) Bring your béchamel to a light simmer, and keep it moving so that it doesn’t burn. The longer you simmer your sauce, the thicker it will become. Keep in mind that your sauce will thicken while it cools as well, so don’t let your sauce get to thick before pulling it from the heat.

4) When you remove your béchamel from the heat, pour it through a wire mesh strainer to make sure you don’t have any lumps in your sauce, and season with kosher salt and white pepper(because no one wants to see black pepper in a white sauce).

*If you want to create a daughter sauce of béchamel, you can add ingredients right before removing your sauce from the heat. Two popular daughter sauces are a mornay, which is a cheesy version of our béchamel mother sauce, and a soubise, which is a béchamel sauce where the sauce is enhanced with the flavor of cooked onions.

Thank you for checking out out this amazingly versatile sauce with me, and I hope you’ll try this recipe very soon.