Cheese Sauce: Part 2

Onwards with the lasagne adventure!

After you have made your beautiful bolognese sauce, you’ll need a different sauce to layer with it to make delicious baked pasta dishes. Opinion is split over whether this second sauce ought to be a white sauce, or a béchamel sauce, or something else fancy.

Nessie likes to make cheese sauce for lasagne, because Nessie likes cheese. A lot. (But not as much as he likes his favourite red spatula).

The first thing you need to make a cheesy sauce of cheesiness, is a saucepan. You will also need some scales. This cheese sauce recipe uses imperial units like the Victoria sponge cake, because it is a family recipe passed down from Mama Nessie to Baby Nessie, through many Nessie generations.

It’s a really simple sauce that starts out as a basic white sauce – this can be used as a base for many other more complicated sauces, and is a good sauce to be able to make if you want to impress someone with your sauce prowess. (Baby Nessie enjoys semantic satiation).

Some people say you should always make a white sauce using the roux method – while this is a valid way of making it, it can seem scary to sauce beginners. It’s not that difficult, but requires care and can go wrong. Nessie is a proponent of a different white sauce making method, called chuck-everything-into-the-pan-at-once. It’s great!

This recipe is really easy to remember because the ingredients are so simple – for enough cheese sauce for two people, you need an ounce of flour, an ounce of butter, and half a pint of milk.

Say it with Nessie now: “An ounce, an ounce, and half a pint”.

If you remember that ratio, you’ll always be able to whip up a tasty cheese sauce to put on cauliflower or pasta for dinner (see the bottom of the page for detailed dinner suggestions for your cheese sauce).

For the lasagne, Nessie is making double the quantity of cheese sauce. So that means 2 ounces of butter…

… 2 ounces of flour (Nessie uses plain, but it doesn’t really matter)…

…and 1 pint of milk (again, it doesn’t matter what kind (although Nessie has only ever used cow milk of various fat percentages. He makes no promises about what might happen if you use vegetable milk)).

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan, and put the saucepan on the stove. Break out your best red whisk (other colours of whisk are acceptable but clearly not ideal).

Nessie’s whisk is made of sillykown silicone, because the inside of the saucepan is non-stick and he doesn’t want to scratch it.

Put the stove on a medium heat, and stir continuously with the whisk. This bit is important – you don’t have to whisk very hard, but just keep it moving and no lumps will form 🙂

It may look odd to begin with, and like it will never become smooth delicious sauce, but just keep whisking. After a little while of heating and stirring, all the butter will melt and the flour will sort of dissolve into the milk.

After a bit more heating and stirring, it will incorporate into a smooth sauce, and then gradually thicken.

When the sauce is thicker and clings to the whisk/side of the pan, turn the heat down to low and grate some cheeeeeeeeeeeeeese. (Or stop at this point and do something else with the white sauce you have created. Nessie won’t judge).

Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese. Nessie is using mature cheddar, because it is good for making things taste cheesy.

You can use other types of cheese if you don’t have cheddar available. But try to at least use a similar kind of cheese. Nessie has no idea what would happen if you tried to grate brie into this sauce, and will not be held accountable for any cheese variation related disasters.

As you can see, Nessie has grated approximately half of the cheese. It doesn’t really matter how much cheese you put in – add more or less depending on how cheesy you like your sauce to be.

Put the grated cheese into the saucepan, and stir it around until it melts. Taste the sauce and decide whether it is cheesy enough. If it is not cheesy enough, add more cheese.

If it is too cheesy, you are wrong. It is not too cheesy you probably shouldn’t have added so much cheese. At least you’ll know for next time!

When all the cheese has been mixed in, it should look a bit like this. It kind of looks like the white sauce, but a bit cheesier.

And that’s it! You have made a cheese sauce! Congratulations!


If you are making this cheese sauce in order to make lasagne, proceed to the next lasagne installment for assembly instructions.

If you are hoping for ideas to make your cheese sauce into dinner, you are in luck! Nessie has written some ideas just below.

 

You can add different things to the sauce as flavouring, if you like, like tomatoes, or wholegrain mustard, or nutmeg (an odd one, but it works quite well). You can also stir in some crème fraîche or sour cream, which makes it a bit thicker and creamier, and makes you feel very decadent.

For a basic macaroni cheese, cook some macaroni and then put the cheese sauce on top. If for some reason you don’t like macaroni but you do like other kinds of pasta, cook some other pasta instead. Nessie likes fusilli pasta.

To make your cheesy pasta more tasty, try frying some onion/bacon/ham/mushrooms or a combination thereof and stirring it in to the sauce before topping the pasta. Nessie likes frying onion and ham, and then adding it to the sauce together with sweetcorn (tinned or frozen). It makes an excellent dinner!

This souped-up version of the cheese sauce can also be used with great success as a savoury pancake filling, which is excellent when you want an excuse to just eat pancakes for dinner.

To make cauliflower cheese, boil some cauliflower (drain it and put it on a plate) and pour cheese sauce over the top. It tastes excellent with a sprinkle of paprika or pepper on top. Cauliflower cheese and chips is one of Nessie’s favourite weekend dinners, because it’s easy, but tastes good! To make it a bit fancier, you can tip the cauliflower and the cheese sauce into an ovenproof baking dish and top with crushed crisps and grated cheese, then bake until the topping is golden. Don’t do that when you’re really hungry, though, otherwise you’ll just be looking mournfully at the oven all the time that it’s baking.