ottawa foodies

The members here are quite varied. Some will think making white sauce is the height of culinary art, others make one as a matter of course.

The reason I was thinking about this was, I was making dinner tonight and thinking about tomorrow night ... MMMmmmmm. Gnocci in a nice cheese sauce, with some lightly browned onions and mushrooms. Oh, yeah.

Cheese sauce. Not a problem. I do that all the time. Wait. This is pretty close to Mac&Cheez, now that I think about it. Why don't I make a short post about how to do that without pouring it out of a box? I could do that, but it would sound preachy.

White sauce. Simple. If I could get people to understand that you can make a decent cheese sauce from scratch in the time it would take to boil the water and cook the pasta, maybe they'd give it a try. Okay, sure ... you don't get to watch the Simpsons while the pasta is boiling, but you are learning a skill here. Work with me.

When making dinner-in-a-box, you pour that wretched goop over the warm noodles, then add butter and milk. Well, you've just made a white sauce. TADA! Nothing to it.

There are thin sauces that you might use as a base for a cream soup and there are thick sauces that would make good binders in things like pot pies or what-have-yous. We're going to be concentrating on the regular old white sauce.

Take 2 tablespoons of butter and melt that in a small pot over low to medium heat.

Add an equal measure of flour and stir. This will turn into a paste. Let it cook for 4-5 minutes. This will actually COOK the flour and get rid of any flour taste.

You're going to be adding a cup of milk, but only a bit at a time. Put in a splash, maybe enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Stir it in. Keep stirring. This seems to have the opposite effect of what you thought it would. It made a tight little ball in the bottom of the pan. No, actually that's good. It means that you aren't going to have lumps because you are spreading the flour mixture out evenly. Add some more milk. Mix it in. Repeat this 3 or 4 times. Seriously. If you put too much milk in at once, you risk not incorporating it evenly and then ... the dreaded lumps. When there is about a third of a cup left, you can probably pour the rest in and mix it all up.

Let it sit a little, then stir. Let it sit, then stir. Eventually it will start to stiffen up a bit (MAGIC) and you can take it off the heat. While letting it sit, you can grate up some cheese. Whatever you want, but I usually use cheddar for this application. About half-a-cup.

If the sauce looks a bit thick, add a little more milk and stir, stir, stir. When it is at the consistency that you like, add the cheese and let it melt. This will certainly thicken the sauce up, so it is best to start with one that is a bit thinner than you want. If it ends up too thin, just cook it a little while longer.

By now your pasta is done and you can just pour it all together and distribute to waiting plates and devour ravenously.

Now you get to experiment with different pasta shapes, or cheeses, or adding chili powders to the sauce. Nice sausages instead of hot dogs. The next thing you know, you'll be frying up some gnocci to put it on and impressing a bunch of people on the internet.

BTW, for a thin sauce, use 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour.
For a thicker sauce, use 4 tablespoons. Or 3. I don't care. This isn't that precise a science.

Play around and see what works for you.

Then again, maybe you're the kind of person who buys pre-mashed potatoes in a bag at the grocery store. Nothing wrong with that.

I could barely cook at all when I started university. Ironically, I could make bread and I could make cookies, but anything else was beyond me. Then I learned how to make white sauce.

It was like a whole new world opened up to me in my small-town, chili-means-red-not-spicy, part of the East Cost. ;)

The importance of learning this skill was seconded only by learning how to cook rice by the closed-pot method instead of the boil-the-bejeezus-out-of-it-and-drain-the-extra-water method. ;)

Who knew rice could have both flavour AND texture? Mind-blowing, it was.. ;)

Hooray! I think that the most important part is the adding of milk a little bit at a time. Dump it in all at once and it's just going to be sloshy. It only took me, like, a hundred times to figure out that I would be rewarded for my patience.

The importance of making a roux is one of the great fallacies of cooking, especially when you're making a cheese sauce. Simply putting 400ml of cold milk, 25g of flour and 40g of butter into a pan and then continually stirring as it heats up will produce a perfectly acceptable white sauce without any suggestion or risk of lumps.

I didn't wish to be the one to point this out but I agree 100%. I've used the "all in one" method for many years. The results are identical to making a roux first but I find it a bit easier. The keys to this method are:
- It needs to be whisked continuously with no pause whatsoever.
- The flour gets cooked after the sauce thickens so you need to continue to simmer gently for 5 minutes once it thickens.

Adding warmed milk is helpful as well, the pot doesn't lose all it's heat when liquid is added, creating a slightly more smooth and continuous process.

I find it takes a lot of simmering (i.e. 30+ minutes) to eliminate the chalky, starchy flavour of flour that has not been initially cooked lightly in fat. Even the technique of thickening beef bourguignon or coq au vin with a buerre manie (flour and cold butter paste) requires significant gentle simmering (45 min) to reduce this flavour in my view.