Béchamel sauce Béchamel sauce Béchamel sauce (; ), also known as white sauce, is made from a white roux (butter and flour) and milk. It has been considered, since the seventeenth century, one of the mother sauces of French cuisine. It is used as the base for other sauces (such as Mornay sauce, which is Béchamel with cheese). Balsamell or Besciamella is the Italian equivalent of the French Béchamel: a very simple white sauce of flour, butter and milk. The sauce was originally from renaissance Tuscany and was known as "Salsa Colla or Colletta" ("glue sauce") because of the gluey consistency of
Butter mostly due to the butterfat composition in the finished product. Butter contains fat in three separate forms: free butterfat, butterfat crystals, and undamaged fat globules. In the finished product, different proportions of these forms result in different consistencies within the butter; butters with many crystals are harder than butters dominated by free fats. Churning produces small butter grains floating in the water-based portion of the cream. This watery liquid is called buttermilk—although the buttermilk most common today is instead a directly fermented skimmed milk. The buttermilk is drained off; sometimes more buttermilk is removed by rinsing the grains with water.