Are Béchamel And White Sauce The Same Thing?

In a word: yes — but there's still much to learn about this monochromatic mother sauce. Béchamel is one of the five mother sauces that form the foundation of French cuisine: béchamel, velouté, tomato, hollandaise, and espagnole. In theory, you can create any sauce by building off of one of these bases. This idea is easily proved true with a béchamel.

Béchamel starts with a roux where equal parts butter and flour are cooked together. Creating and cooking a roux ensures your sauce will thicken after adding a liquid. The third and final ingredient in a béchamel is milk, which is slowly whisked into the roux until no lumps remain. Various recipes will ask for various consistencies: thicker for a croque monsieur, thinner for lasagna. The longer you cook your sauce, the thicker it will be. A true béchamel is milk, butter, and flour alone, but you'll likely want to add salt, pepper, or even a dash of nutmeg for depth of flavor.

For simplicity's sake, and perhaps to avoid the trickier French pronunciation, Americans have renamed béchamel sauce as white sauce, though there is no difference between the two. However, if you see white sauce listed on a menu, you might be primed to think of other sauces that are white in color like Alfredo, Mornay, or a garlic cream sauce. Don't be fooled by similarly colored sauces and remember that white sauce is simply a three-ingredient mother sauce.

On its own, béchamel or white sauce is a welcome flavor builder in lasagnas, soufflés, and gratins. But when you think of white sauce, you might be envisioning a bit more flavor. That's because béchamel is the base of many of our favorite dishes and sauces. When you add cheese to a béchamel, you're creating a Mornay sauce (or cheese sauce). Gruyère and Parmesan make a traditional Mornay, but you'll add sharp cheddar to build the flavors of your favorite mac and cheese or Monterey Jack and cotija to create a delicious queso.

Alfredo sauce, perhaps the next most famous white sauce, uses heavy cream in place of milk, and the addition of a hard Italian cheese like Parmesan. Adding sautéed garlic creates a garlic cream sauce, sautéed mushrooms a mushroom cream sauce, tomato paste a tomato cream sauce, pesto a pesto cream sauce, and so forth. Now you know, there's much more than meets the eye when it comes to white sauce, and your favorite, elaborate pasta dish probably started with three simple pantry staples.