How to Make Veloute

Learn how to make veloute, one of the five French mother sauces. It’s a simple three-ingredient base sauce you can use to make all kinds of different dishes. It’s rich and velvety and very easy to make.

This post, recipe, and photos have been updated from the archives. First published in March 2015.

Have you seen The Hundred-Foot Journey? It’s a wonderful movie about a family that opens an Indian restaurant in a small French village just 100 feet away from a Michelin Star restaurant run by stately and proper women played by Helen Mirren. Of course, the neighbors clash and what follows is a story about food, culture, family, pride, love, and, ultimately, understanding. If you haven’t seen it, you must – it’s a great foodie film and it will leave you happy, inspired, and craving French food. At least it did for me.

French Mother Sauces

In the movie there’s a lot of talk about the five mother sauces of French cuisine:

• Veloute
• Tomate
• Espagnole
• Bechamel
• Hollandaise

After watching the movies, I was totally inspired to learn all five myself. I was familiar with hollandaise and bechamel, having made both of them before, but the other three were a mystery. From there, an idea was born and I decided to learn how to make them.

Veloute Sauce

So, first up, we’re talking about veloute – sounds so exotic and mysterious. At least that’s what I thought before I made it – after doing some research I quickly learned that there’s not much to it and all you need is:

• Low-sodium chicken stock or broth
• Unsalted butter
• All-purpose flour

Chicken veloute is the most common, but there is also fish, veal and beef veloute. For a darker sauce, use chicken stock. For a lighter-colored sauce use broth. You can, of course, use homemade stock or a good quality store-bought stock.

I have made versions with stock and broth and I prefer a lighter colored sauce so I mostly use broth, but you can choose what you like best. The most important thing is to use low-sodium broth or stock so you can control the seasoning.

All by itself, it’s not too exciting, but it can be used as a base to build so many different kinds of sauces:

• Sauce vin blanc (white wine sauce)
• Sauce supreme (veloute with cream)
• Sauce Parisienne (veloute, cream, and egg sauce)

Those are just a few ideas or you can get crazy and create your own derivative – veloute is like a blank canvas. A blank canvas with butter.

Here’s the great news: because it doesn’t have any milk or cream it freezes really well, which means you can make a decent-sized batch, store it in the freezer, and pull it out when you want a fancy sauce for your dinner. Making it ahead will save you about 30 minutes, so I think it’s worth it to make a bigger batch – you never know when a sauce craving might hit.

How to Make It

The other good news? It’s not hard to make – sure, it needs attention, but it’s not stressful and, once you get going on it, you realize you’ve probably made something like it before – have you ever made gravy? It’s a lot like that.

• Traditionally, veloute requires two saucepans – one to heat the chicken stock and the other to make the roux. In the many times I’ve made it, I’ve stopped doing that because I’ve never had problems using unheated broth and the sauce comes out fine. So, if you want to warm it first, great, or don’t it will be fine. So, for this recipe, you only need one saucepan.
• Melt four tablespoons of butter over medium heat, add four tablespoons flour and stir until it forms a loose paste (also known as the roux), which will thicken the chicken stock and produce a nice velvety sauce. (Side note: did you know veloute means velvet? Me neither until I looked it up!)
• Adjust the heat, if needed, to prevent the roux from browning. You want to keep it as light as possible.
• Next, slowly pour in the chicken stock, whisking continuously, to ensure the flour doesn’t lump up. Bring the mixture to a simmer and reduce it for 20-30 minutes (you will need to stand by and keep whisking), or until it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

That’s it! Oh, wait – you should also strain it using a cheesecloth or a fine-mesh sieve. Straining the sauce gets rid of any little lumps and gives you a super smooth sauce.

How to Store It

• If you don’t plan to use the veloute right away, you can keep it in the refrigerator for up to three days. I like to cover it with plastic wrap so the wrap is right on top of the sauce. This prevents a skin from forming. Reheat the sauce on the stove and whisk it. If needed, you can thin it with a little more broth.
• You can also freeze the sauce for 3 months in a freezer-safe container. To thaw, just leave it in the refrigerator the night before you plan to use it.

I love to use this sauce as a base for Chicken Mushroom Supreme. I’ve also used a variation of it to make my Easy Chicken and Noodles, too.

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Happy sauce-making!

More Sauce Recipes

Here are some other (not French) sauces I love to make, too.

• Easy Enchilada Sauce
• Homemade Pesto
• Tzatziki Sauce
• Slow Cooker Tomato Sauce

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The nutrition information in this recipe is an estimate only and was calculated using Nutrifox, an online nutrition calculator.