floury macaroni cheese 6303

Jen,

OK, here's the long answer. The proportions I shared with you were those I've used successfully for 40 years for a thin Bechamel - one that will be further thickened by the addition of the cheese and used to make macaroni and cheese. A dependable, clbuttic, blonde roux has equal amounts of flour and butter - if you want a thicker white sauce, add more flour AND more butter. Your recipe's proportion of butter to flour is seriously out of wack. It doesn't provide the flour the conditions it needs to cook properly, which is why you are left with that floury taste.

It's not just a matter of longer cooking - your minute or 2 should be more than adequate for such a small amount and you don't want it to brown at all. At the risk of sounding way too Alton Brownish, you need to give the 2 ingredients time to cook and meld together...the individual particles of flour need to absorb and become one with the butter. Not enough butter particles to go around? Then all those unattached flour particles will just hang around tasting eternally pasty and give the sauce that "uncooked flour" taste. That's why the 1 to 1 ratio works so well.

Nancy T