The Mother Sauce

Several months ago, in the early days of spring, I shared my favorite pesto recipe with you. Today, with temperatures and humidity both soaring above 80, we're getting even more fancy with a Vegan White Sauce!

What's that? Why yes, I did get new plates! My dad hauled them all the way from Poland and I'm obsessed with them, thank you very much. And yes, those are fake chicken nuggets. What of it?

The fancy name for white sauce is bechamel - the vast fount of knowledge (aka Wikipedia) tells me that this is one of the five "mother sauces" of French cooking, a term which will never not be funny to me. Given that white sauce is basically butter and full-fat milk, you'd think it would be hard to recreate this sophisticated-sounding gem in a vegan kitchen. But you'd be wrong!

This dairy-free white sauce is smooth and thick, with all of the delicious creaminess of it's non-vegan cousin. Bechamel is perfect on pasta, and is also pretty damn good as a substitution for tomato sauce on pizza. You could probably go wild and use this on lasagne or in some sort of quiche situation - I have yet to experiment with this, but plan on trying it out!

Bechamel Sauce 
slightly adapted from the adorable Veggieful

Makes 2 cups

2 tablespoons Earth Balance
¼ cup tightly packed minced yellow onion
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup non-dairy milk (make sure you use unsweetened and unflavored)
2 tablespoons vegetable stock
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
salt, pepper, and paprika, to taste

Throw your Earth Balance, onions, and garlic into a medium saucepan and sauté over medium-low heat until the butter has melted and the onions are starting to get a tiny bit golden. Dump your flour in and stir vigorously - this is going to be the first of many times that you'll worry you did something horribly wrong, as the mixture will get all kinds of clumpy and weird-looking. Have no fear!

Buttah. 

Add your milk, vegetable stock, and lemon juice to this mess and whisk until everything is smooth. Now you're going to panic because your "sauce" essentially looks like curdled milk - trust me, just keep whisking. Pretty soon the mixture will start to thicken up and smell delicious. At this point, add your nutritional yeast, as well as your salt, pepper, and paprika. Make sure you're cooking at low heat, or your sauce will start to burn!

Have no fear, it'll be okay!

Once your sauce has thickened up, it's ready to serve - you can thin it out a bit by stirring in a couple of extra drops of veggie stock if it's looking a little too much like pudding. I poured my bechamel over pasta with zucchini and tomatoes (homegrown, courtesy of Mama LBV). Bon appétit!