1,542 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

The (small) miracle of béchamel sauce

Making a béchamel sauce is going to confront you with a little miracle that happens every time: You pour milk over a roux, it's very liquid, you stir over a low heat, and then all of a sudden, miracle, the sauce sets, it thickens, you've got your béchamel.

Let's see what happened.

8,663 4/5 (4 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Sauce Method Principle Explanation Starch Temperature Roux Consistency Béchamel

Last modified on: August 27^th 2024

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The (small) miracle of béchamel sauce

A basic sauce

louis bechameil

Béchamel is one of the staple sauces of French cuisine, found in a host of recipes. Its name comes from Louis Béchameil, who was maitre d'hôtel to Louis XIV.
Making it is quite simple: first a "roux" mixture of flour and butter, which is heated and colored (hence its name).

roux

Once the roux has reached the right color, cold milk is added, the mixture is very liquid, and you continue to cook and stir over low heat until it thickens (you'll find the full recipe here).
But why does it thicken? As you'd expect, there's no magic involved, just a little physics and chemistry.

Flour and starch

The secret lies in the roux's flour, which contains grains of starch, a complex sugar made up of glucose molecules rolled up into tiny little balls.

amidon

When the milk is added to the roux and heated, the temperature of the mixture gradually rises.
It's around 70°C that the magic happens: the grains of starch in the flour break up into smaller grains, starch molecules that begin to absorb the milk around them, up to 20 times their volume, thus increasing the sauce's viscosity.

This process, known as starch gelatinization, takes place between 70°C and 85°C, giving béchamel its characteristic thick, creamy consistency.
Note in passing that this process of starch gelatinization is also at work in, among other things, crème pâtissière or flan, where flour is often replaced by maïzena, a corn starch.

In short: Béchamel thickens because it contains flour that is heated, causing its starch grains to burst and absorb the milk around them.
So béchamel is not just a culinary classic, it's also a little chemistry lesson in action.

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20251,3045

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,2495

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,130

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20253,1125

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,7873

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

What is the difference between bakery and patisserie?

This is a question that you may well have asked yourself and which I will attempt to answer. In France the two trades of "boulangerie" (bakery) and "pâtisserie" (patisserie and confectionery) have always been quite distinct, but where exactly do the boundaries lie? .
February 7^th 2017134 K 14.1

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very...
October 10^th 201820 K5

Drawing a pattern in pastry

Often in the kitchen, in pastry-making, or in baking, we need to trace a pattern on a pastry. It's just a question of aesthetics but it has its effect after baking on a galette, pithiviers, pâté en croute (terrine in a pie crust), etc.
May 23^th 201935 K4.1

Double cooking of vegetables

When you cook vegetables, it's not easy to capture and preserve the flavours. It is easy to undercook, but you can make up for it, or overcook, and then it is unfortunately a bit cooked (in the sense of "ruined"). But above all, how to get the maximum of the taste of the vegetable in the pan, then...
July 12^th 201925 K4.1

Soup vs. potage

It's true that we're finally coming out of winter as I write these lines, and that we'll all be making, no doubt, a little less soup and potages, but even if it's out of season, it really is a simple and delicious dish, which is one of the always easy answers to "What's for dinner this (Sunday)...
April 9^th 202211 K