Easy White Sauce

Here is my method for making a quick and easy basic White sauce. I've skipped the step of making a Roux to make it much simpler, and avoid any unwanted lumps.  The sauce works well as a basic White Sauce and can be adapted to make any White sauce, sweet or savoury by adding the appropriate ingredients.

How to make Vegetable stock

Many recipes have a stock as the basis of dish, think about Paella or Risotto, stews and soups, the list goes on. A poor stock will spoil the dish while a good stock can elevate it to another level. In Vegetarian food this is probably even more important. The good news is it's cheap and really easy to do.

There are no fixed rules and most of the ingredients can be swapped if you don't have them.

A few of points to remember;

• Chopping the Vegetables more finely will allow more flavour to be extracted.
• You can use bits of Veg. that might otherwise be discarded or wasted such as Vegetable peel and trimmings, broccoli stalks, squishy Tomatoes, outer Cabbage leaves, the list goes on. You can use stuff that may be past it best. Throw in whatever will add to the flavour or needs using up!
• If you're making the stock for a specific recipe don't add ingredients that won't match or will overpower what you're making.

Here is my method for making the Vegetarian stock.

Kneading Dough

Kneading dough is one of the most important stages when making Bread. It can be done in a food processor or by hand, which takes a bit more elbow grease. I'd suggest a minimum of 5 minutes kneading by hand (but probably more like 10) is required for a standard bread dough. 

There's no right or wrong way as such, but the important thing is the dough needs to be worked and stretched to combine all the ingredients and stretch the gluten in the flour making the dough more elastic. Doing it right means you'll get a better texture and structure to your bread.

Here's a video showing my method.

As you can see I use the palm of my hand to push the dough and stretch it, and then pull it back. Just give it a try and find a way that is comfortable for you.

After around 10 minutes the dough should be uniform and the texture should be soft, elastic and springy. That's it! The dough is then ready to prove.

Cooking Onions as a base for a sauce.

So many savoury recipes begin with frying or sweating the onions. It may sound very simple but it's an important step to get the base flavour into a dish so it's worth taking a bit of time to get it right. If the onions are overcooked they will catch and add a burnt flavour to the dish. The key is a light caramelisation to bring out the natural sweetness of the onions. Here is my method.