How to make a Béchamel sauce

So the demonstration I'm going to do for you now is on how to make a Béchamel sauce and this is a standard rue-based sauce, so we're going to start with 25 grams butter and we’re just going to go into the pan with the butter, melt the butter and then stir in an equal quantity of flour, so I'm just melting the butter down and once that's melted we’ll start to add our flour, so the standard recipe is equal quantities of flour and butter and then cold milk added to it, you can infuse the milk with things like an onion studded with cloves and then let that cool down or you can use completely plain and today we're just going to use plain because I want a very neutral sauce, so I’ve put my flour into my melted butter and this is a white rue that we're making so we don't want to colour this, so it's just a question cooking this out for a minute or two until we get a nice sandy texture to it.

Now once the rue’s had a minute or two to cookout we can start adding our cold milk and you want to add this gradually, so small quantity and to start with the rue will thicken up really quickly at some more milk and then you just continue adding the milk gradually, working into the rue until you've used all the milk, once you've added all the milk you want to cook the sauce out for a couple of minutes just to take out a raw flour flavour and then at that point you can season the source, so our sauce has had about five minutes to cook out because what you looking to do is cook out that raw flour flavour and you've got a lovely smooth sauce that just now needs some seasoning, just going to give it a little bit of salt, if you want to add pepper to it, classically you do use white pepper so that the flex of pepper doesn’t show in the sauce, so we’ve added just a bit of salt to that, I'm not going to put any pepper in this one and it gives you again a very neutral based sauce for flavouring in other ways and that's how you make a Béchamel sauce.

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