How to Make White Sauce for Macaroni & Cheese

"Hi! John King for Expert Village. Now we have our roux made and our milk. This is 3/4 of a gallon of milk. I've already warmed it up on the stove. You could add cold milk right to your roux if you wanted but you would have to stand there and stir it and it takes a little bit longer but you want to make sure if yuou are adding cold milk to the roux that you want to bring it up to boiling point so that the roux will thicken your sauce. So if you don't, it will taste just like a flour taste and it won't taste good at all and it won't thicken like it should. If you are doing it this way, you have to make sure it is close to the boiling point or if you are just adding it cold, you have to make sure that you bring it up to a boil and keep stirring it in your pot. So we are going to pour the milk into the hot roux, stir that around, make sure that it is completely dissolved. You want to make sure you get in the corners of your pan with your whip because a lot of times your roux will stick there and kind of hard to get in those corners but you have to make sure that it is completely dissolved that way and you basically have a bechamel or white sauce. It is a very important sauce to learn to make in cooking. You can do a lot of different things from this base sauce. You could make scalloped potatoes and ham with a white sauce you already made or you could also make pasta primavera by adding a little white wine, garlic, fresh basil. So there are a lot of different things you can do with a white sauce so once you learn how to make it, you can make a lot of different things from that base sauce."