During this week (I don’t remember which day) I made this béchamel sauce to go with some vegetables.
I have loved Béchamel sauce very well before my vegan days with Béchamel pastas being my favourite use for the sauce!
This béchamel sauce is not different from other recipes you might find on the internet. I have just veganized my own pre-vegan béchamel recipe using almond milk.
I did not have any almond milk all ready to use. And almond milk requires the almonds to be soaked for at least 6 hours before blending with water. But that evening, I just added about 10 almonds to 300 ml hot water and mixed them in the blended. I obtained a nice milk although a little bit thinner than with soaked almonds. But it was okay to use.
Any other non dairy milk is fine too.
As for the veggies, I used carrots, long green beans and bottle gourd (also known as calabash). Bottle gourd is a tropical local vegetable and it might not be available everywhere. You can just replace it by courgettes (zucchini) if you can’t find any. Just any veggies you like will do! Sautee them in some margarine or just have them steamed topped with the béchamel sauce. The good thing is that the sauce is ready in about the same time that the veggies will take to be steamed. So, you have a meal in about 20 minutes!
Garlic Béchamel Sauce:
300 ml almond milk (or soy milk)
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 teaspoon margarine
1-2 gloves garlic, grated of finely chopped (or ¾ teaspoon garlic paste)
Salt to taste
Water (room temperature)
- In a (preferably non-stick) pan, add the margarine and garlic on low heat. Sautee for 1 minute.
- Mix the flour with a little water in a glass or small bowl. Stir and mix well to remove all lumps.
- Reduce heat to very low and pour this flour mixture in the pan.
- Stir vigorously and almost immediately add almond milk, a little at a time, stirring to blend the flour mixture well to avoid lumps.
- Increase heat to medium and simmer while stirring gently until mixture thickens.
- Add salt to taste.
To serve, pour the hot sauce onto the vegetables into the serving plate.
The leftover béchamel sauce was used the next day over some pasta with vegetables and red beans. It was nicer with the pasta!
miammm miammm!!! Ce sont des brocolis que je vois ???
ReplyDeletei have never made my own béchamel sauce. this means i'll have to try yours 'cause it looks awesome! :D
ReplyDeleteHave you tried using raw cashews -- you can make up a heavy cashew cream with raw cashews and water that might allow you to make this a bit thicker.
ReplyDeleteCheck out some of the Millennium Restaurant cookbooks if you have access to them. I think Artful Vegan has the cashew cream instructions.
La pingouine and jessy: Thank you both for your comments. I hope to be more regular with blogging again now.
ReplyDeletejennconspiracy: I am bit allergic to nuts, peanuts and cashews being the worse of the lot. I do love cashews and I do cheat a lot of times with a few. A lot of them would give me a really bad hay fever. So I avoid them. But it would have been great to try this, thanks for the tip! Cashews being so nice, I wish there was a cure for nut allergy!
Awesome! The pictures look very tempting!
ReplyDelete