| January 21st, 2013 |
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya has a cold and wanted comfort food for dinner. Specifically, macaroni and cheese. (In actual case, pasta spirals and cheese sauce, but the concept is there.) I made the cheese sauce, and am now going to post the recipe, because she liked it and YOU CAN'T STOP ME.
Sami's Cheese Sauce
Ingredients:
- a bit of butter
- a bit of flour
- a pinch of salt
- a lot of milk
- a bunch of grated cheese
(Approximate quantities used tonight: about 1 tbsp of butter, 2 tbsp of gluten-free plain flour, 1 litre of milk, 2-3 cups of grated low-fat cheddar. Australian cheddar, the yellow kind. Not weird orange American cheddar. Like, Coon, or Bega, or whatever, I can't even remember, but standard cheese.)
Cook in either a saucepan or a jug/bowl, depending on whether you're doing it stovetop or microwave. Either works.
You will also need either a spoon or a whisk. I prefer using a French whisk because it's trivial that way to keep the sauce from having any lumps in it, but a spoon works too. (If your saucepan has a non-stick coating, then you'll have to use a wooden spoon and like it, or else destroy your saucepan.)
Method:
Put butter in cooking container, and heat it up until it's melted. Add flour, stir together thoroughly. Heat some more, until the flour/butter mixture looks sort of like a honeycomb.
Add some milk. About a cup's worth, NOT all the milk. Add a pinch of salt. Not a big pinch. Stir it all together *thoroughly*, then return to heat. On the stove, stir gently every minute or so until it starts to thicken. In the microwave, put it on for two minutes at a time until it starts to thicken up.
This can take several minutes at this point because the milk was cold, but it *will* start to thicken. If I'm doing it in the microwave, I generally miss the "starts to thicken" window and take it out at "oh, wow, it's all thick now", but that's fine, because I use a French whisk, so it doesn't end up lumpy. If you're using a spoon, you want to avoid it thickening too much at once, because lumps.
Add a bit more milk, stir it in thoroughly, then heat it some more. (Microwave: about 90 seconds at a time, generally.) Gradually add milk until you have about as much sauce as you want. If you want *moar sauce* you more-or-less just need to add more milk. If it's not getting thick enough, add a little bit more flour.
When you're happy with your quantity of sauce, add in the cheese, a handful at a time, and stir it in so it melts/dissolves into the sauce.
You have achieved sauce!
You can add stuff into it, and it will be delicious: chopped up ham, eggs, chicken for protein, and it works nicely with just about every kind of vegetable.
Serve over the pasta of your choice.
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