What causes Béchamel Sauce to get so clumpy? [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How not to mess up Béchamel sauce

Just starting to learn how to create cream sauces for dishes; as it's foreign to me. Most the sauces i know start with a slurry and soy sauce.

I tried creating sauces from this recipe.

Béchamel Sauce:

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 cup heated milk
• salt
• white pepper
• freshly ground nutmeg (optional)

It seems to get lumpy. What is the trick? I think i may have added the flour too quickly or the milk had to be much hotter

Answer

Normally, in industry, you combine the butter and flour, and cook it for a bit (usually gets a nice nutty aroma). Then, you heat the milk to a boil, and add some of the milk to the cooked roux (fat and flour). This will be VERY thick. You can easily whisk the lumps out of that. You then add this back into the other milk, which thickens the milk. Also, in industry, there is often just a big pail of roux, and a shortcut is to heat the milk, and then add the roux in a bit at a time, whisking like hell to get out the lumps. You can control the thickness of the sauce better that way. When you have the desired thickness, you then season.

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