How to make a veloute base sauce for pies
Melt 50g butter, stir in 50g plain flour to make a roux, cook it for two minutes, then whisk in 500ml warm chicken stock in stages and simmer until the sauce thickly coats a spoon. Veloute is the classic binding sauce for chicken pies: stock-based, silky, and thick enough to hold the filling together under the crust.
By the chickenpie.net test kitchen · Published 24 August 2026
The sauce that holds a pie together
Veloute is one of the French mother sauces: a blond roux moistened with light stock. Where bechamel uses milk, veloute uses the poaching liquid or stock from your chicken, which is why it belongs in a pie. It binds meat and vegetables into one cohesive filling, and its body is what stands between you and a lid collapsing into soup.
The working ratio is equal weights of butter and flour, with roughly ten times that weight in stock: 50g butter, 50g flour, 500ml stock gives a sauce on the thick side of pourable, which is correct for pies. A looser sauce that seems fine in the pan will thin further as the filling's vegetables release water in the oven.
Step by step
Warm stock and steady whisking prevent lumps. Everything else is patience.
- Warm 500ml chicken stock in a pan or microwave. Cold stock hitting hot roux is where lumps are born.
- Melt 50g butter in a heavy saucepan over medium heat.
- Stir in 50g plain flour to form a smooth paste and cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes until it smells biscuity but has not coloured beyond pale straw.
- Add a ladleful of stock and whisk until completely smooth. It will thicken dramatically. Keep whisking.
- Add the remaining stock in three or four additions, whisking each fully in before the next.
- Simmer gently for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring often, to cook out any floury taste.
- Check the thickness: the sauce should coat the back of a spoon and hold a clear line when you draw a finger through it.
- Season with salt, white pepper, and a squeeze of lemon, then fold in your chicken and vegetables off the heat.
Enriching and adjusting
A splash of double cream or creme fraiche stirred in at the end turns veloute into the paler, richer sauce most people picture inside a chicken pie. Mustard, tarragon, or a reduction of cider or white wine all sit happily on the same base.
Too thick is easy to fix with a splash of stock. Too thin is slower: simmer it down, or whisk in a paste of equal parts soft butter and flour, a beurre manie, in small additions until it tightens. Bechamel, made with milk instead of stock, does the same job in many Asian bakery pies, and the ratios for bechamel pie filling translate directly to a veloute.