Sauce Béchamel

As a young kid, I think béchamel sauce was my first exposure to anything “French” in the kitchen. Looking back, Bechamel is probably the best mother sauce to be the first mother sauce a new chef learns because compared to the other sauces, it requires significantly less mise en place, that is, preparatory work before you start cooking to make sure “everything is in its place.” If you’ve already read my article on velouté, then you have a pretty good primer. If this is you, all you need to know is that you should follow the velouté instructions, except your liquid will be milk instead of white stock. If you haven’t read my previous article, stick around and I’ll explain béchamel.

Béchamel is one of the five fundamental sauces of French cooking, one of its Mother Sauces. One of its “daughters,” Mornay (bechamel plus shredded cheese which is melted into it) is the sauce base for American mac and cheese.
Bechamel begins, as does velouté, with what’s called a white roux. A “roux” in French cuisine is a flour-butter paste made of equal proportions of those ingredients which are cooked over low heat to some degree of color which serves as a thickener. If you’ve ever made gumbo, you’ve made a roux which, chances are, was quite dark. There will come a time in this series of articles where we need a dark roux, but béchamel is not that use-case. The proper roux used in a béchamel is cooked down just until the ingredients don’t smell “floury” anymore, but instead take on a rather nutty character (imagine the smell of freshly toasted nuts—that’s what we’re going for, without burning anything). It is especially important that the roux that has been made for a bechamel not be allowed to burn. If there’s even a hint of burned smell coming from your roux, throw it away, clean your pan out, and get more flour and butter to start again.

 
Once the roux is nutty, add milk half a cup at a time until you have enough sauce in your saucepan.  Simmer about 20 minutes on very low heat. Whisk constantly to prevent anything from burning on the sides or bottom of the saucepan, and to discourage the formation of lumps in the sauce. Sauces thickened by roux get more viscous as they cool; as with the velouté, make bechamel only in a time of immediate need to prevent degradation of texture or flavor caused by this thermal thickening. Season a bechamel with salt, freshly ground pepper, and fresh-grated nutmeg.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Photo Credit to Epicurious