Dhruv Baker's white sauce recipe - Waitrose

http://bit.ly/qYp5CH - This is an incredibly useful recipe to know -- you can add onions, bay leaves and peppercorns to the milk to make béchamel sauce; add parsley at the end to make parsley sauce; or even cheese to make a classic Mornay sauce.

It's a very simple recipe using three ingredients, which are milk, butter and flour. To start off with heat the milk very gently. Now it's equal proportions of butter to flour, use 25g of butter, and wait for that butter to melt, once that's almost started foaming add in the flour. Now it's probably going to take about a minute or two till it's come to the right colour and you'll smell almost a lovely nuttiness coming from that.

There are lots of variations you can do on this sauce, this is a very simple, very classic white sauce that you can actually use as foundation and build on it. So you can make a béchamel which is very similar but you add onions, bay leaves, peppercorns to the milk when you're heating it -- so that's sort of more layers of flavour. Or you can use the white sauce and you can add some parsley at the end, to get a parsley sauce, or cheese -- so that's your classic Mornay sauce. So, as a foundation it's an excellent starting point for a lot of different sauces.

Now come to the colour and the right smell, and now start adding the milk bit by bit. One ladle at a time and make sure you stir that through so you get a very even base from which to make the sauce. Use a wooden spoon or a whisk, whichever you are more comfortable with.

Now even though we've got all the milk into the sauce we've got to reduce it a little bit, so season the sauce with salt and pepper. Don't add any salt at this point as it's going to reduce, so if you add the salt now and reduce it you're actually going to increase the proportion of salt to sauce, so it'll end up being over-seasoned. So cook it down to the thickness and then season it right at the end. So a couple of twists of black pepper and just a little bit of salt. And just have a little taste. Now ladle it into a gravy boat.

For more recipes from Dhruv Baker visit the WaitroseLIVE magazine at http://waitroselive.mymedia.co.uk/.

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