How To Make A Traditional Bechamel Sauce

Step 1: You will need

Hi, I'm Matt Kemp from the Underground Cookery School. I'm going to show you how to make a series of sauces. I hope you enjoy.

Hi, cookery lovers. Today, I'm going to show you how to make the perfect bechamel sauce. The first thing we need to do is to put a pan on the hob and you do need to do it in this order, so you need to put the butter in first like so.

And I'm always a bit funny when I'm melting butter over the hob because you can catch quite easily, or burn quite easily so I always adopt the method of a combination of part on the hob and part off. As soon as all that butter is melted, I'm going to add just some regular cooking flour. There we go, it's all melted.

In it goes. And I'm just going to give it a good old stir, with a whisk. Now, what we've done is we have made a classic roux there.

And that roux is what is going to thicken out our bechamel sauce. I am now going to add the milk, and I'm going to keep stirring that milk, and at the same time, just reduce the temperature. I'm going to add two more ingredients, which are peppercorns, I'm going to put two of those in, and a bay leaf.

Now, I've only done a very small sauce here so this is going to cook, well, literally in seconds. But obviously, when you make bigger ones, it is going to take a lot longer to cook out. The other thing is, as I always say in any of my cookery videos, don't look at the clock, always look at the consistency of what you are doing.

What I want to achieve here is a nice thick, white sauce. Now, I've pretty much got that. As I said it was, it happened quite quickly because it was only a small sauce.

And I'm going to give you an idea of the consistency which I believe to be about right. I am going to pass it through this sieve because I don't want the peppercorns or the bay leaf in the sauce. But that gives you an idea of the texture and that's the sort of thing that you might use in, for example, a lasagna.

There you have the perfect bechamel sauce.