Béchamel Sauce

Sauces

The French mother sauce you'll use more than any other. Smooth, creamy, and ready in fifteen minutes. Once you know how to make a proper béchamel, a whole world of French cooking opens up, gratins, lasagne, croque monsieur, soufflés, and more. This is the classic all-purpose version.

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Prep Time 2 minutes mins

Cook Time 12 minutes mins

Total Time 14 minutes mins

Servings 4

Ingredients 

1x2x3x?

• 50 gr unsalted butter
• 50 gr plain flour
• 500 ml whole milk
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 pinch white pepper
• 1 pinch nutmeg freshly grated

Equipment

saucepan

whisk

wooden spoon

lemon zester to grate nutmeg

Instructions

Make the roux

• Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over a low to medium heat. Once it's fully melted and just starting to foam, add the flour all at once. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon or whisk until you have a smooth, pale paste. This is your roux. Cook it for 1 to 2 minutes , stirring constantly, to cook out the raw flour taste. The roux should smell faintly biscuity but not brown.

Add the milk

• Remove the pan from the heat. Add the milk in a slow, steady stream, whisking constantly to incorporate each addition before adding more. Adding all the milk at once causes lumps. Take your time with the first few additions, then pour the rest in more freely once the mixture is smooth and loose.

Cook until thickened

• Return the pan to a medium-low heat. Whisk continuously as the sauce heats and begins to thicken, about 5 to 8 minutes . The sauce is ready when it coats the back of a spoon and a finger drawn across it leaves a clean line.

Season and serve

• Remove from the heat. Season with salt, white pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg. Taste and adjust. Use immediately or press clingfilm directly onto the surface to prevent a skin forming.

Notes

• Traditional French béchamel uses white pepper to keep the sauce visually clean. Black pepper works perfectly well but leaves visible specks. Use whichever you prefer.
• Warm the milk first if you can as cold milk added to a hot roux is the most common cause of lumps. Warm the milk gently in a separate pan before adding it. Not boiling mind you, just warm.
• Whisk constantly and don’t walk away. The sauce can catch on the bottom of the pan quickly, especially once it starts to thicken. Keep whisking and keep the heat medium-low.
• Nutmeg is not optional if you want to do it the French way. In classical French cooking, nutmeg is an essential part of béchamel, not a garnish. Use freshly grated if you can, pre-ground nutmeg has much less flavour.
• Lumpy sauce? Don’t panic. Remove from the heat and whisk vigorously. If lumps persist, pass the sauce through a fine sieve. It will be perfectly smooth.
• Béchamel keeps well in the fridge for up to 3 days. Press a sheet of clingfilm directly onto the surface before refrigerating, this prevents a skin from forming. Reheat gently over a low heat, whisking in a splash of milk to loosen if needed.

About this recipe

I knew how to make a bechamel sauce as a child. Also written as bechamél, and often simply called white sauce in English. The ratio is so simple to remember which is equal weights of butter and flour, then ten times that weight in milk. Once you’ve made it once or twice, it just becomes second nature. It is a recipe that opens up an enormous amount of French cooking. Lasagna, croque madame, soufflé, croquettes. All made with this bechamel sauce recipe. It holds together some of the most satisfying dishes in the entire French repertoire, and it takes fifteen minutes.

The bechamel sauce has a disputed past

The history of this bechamel sauce recipe has a good story behind it. In 1651, a French chef called François Pierre de La Varenne published Le Cuisinier François, one of the most influential cookbooks in French culinary history. In it, he included a new white sauce made from a butter and flour roux finished with milk. He named it after Louis de Béchameil, a wealthy financier and chief steward to King Louis XIV, not because Béchameil had anything to do with inventing it, but simply to flatter him. That’s how things worked at the court of Versailles.

The Duke of Escars, who had been making cream sauces for years before any of this, was not impressed. “That fellow Béchameil has all the luck,” he reportedly said. “I was serving breast of chicken à la crème more than twenty years before he was born, but I have never had the chance of giving my name to even the most modest sauce.”

Four hundred years later, we’re still calling it béchamel. Louis de Béchameil, who never cooked a thing in his life, won that one.

Was it French at all?

The Italians have their own version of events. Their claim is that béchamel sauce didn’t originate in France at all, but in Tuscany, where it was known as “salsa colla” and was brought to the French court by Catherine de Medici when she married King Henry II in 1533. According to this theory, her Italian chefs introduced the sauce to the royal kitchens, and the French simply claimed it as their own a century later.

The French point out, not unreasonably, that archival research found no Italian chefs among Catherine de Medici’s household staff at any point during her time in France. They also note that “salsa colla” doesn’t appear in any Italian historical record until the 19th century, well after the French had already been making béchamel sauce for two hundred years.

Nobody has settled this. Both countries make the sauce almost identically. The Italians call their version besciamella. And both tastes exactly the same. The argument has been going on for centuries and shows no sign of resolving itself, but honestly, who cares? Italy and France are neighbours and both countries make gorgeous food. Let’s just agree on the fact that this bechamel recipe is simply delicious, wherever it came from.

One of the five mother sauces

The term “mother sauces” dates back to the early nineteenth century, when French chef Marie-Antoine Carême organised sauces into four foundational categories. Later, Auguste Escoffier refined and codified the list in Le Guide Culinaire, adding a fifth sauce. Those five sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and sauce tomate) remain the foundation of classical French cooking taught in culinary schools worldwide today.

The logic behind mother sauces is elegant. Master one base technique and the variations follow naturally. From this one bechamel sauce white sauce base, you could get for example:

Sauce Soubise
Béchamel enriched with slow-cooked puréed onions. A beautiful accompaniment for vegetables and white meats.

Sauce Nantua
Béchamel flavoured with crayfish butter. An elegant topping for grilled seafood.

How to adjust for different uses

This bechamel recipe gives you a medium thickness, the all-purpose version that works for most dishes. The ratio is easy to adjust depending on what you’re making.

The ratio to remember: equal weights of butter and flour, then ten times that weight in milk. Scale up or down as needed and the sauce will always work. That’s all you need to know to make your French Mother Sauce!