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Sauce

Roux Blond

A roux made by cooking butter and flour until the flour is cooked but not browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roux Blond

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, skimming off any impurities.

  2. Mix in the flour to form a soft paste.

  3. Stir over heat with a spoon until it reaches a full boil.

Cook and cool

  1. Remove the saucepan from the heat and cook on moderate heat until the flour cooks without browning.

  2. After a few minutes, remove from heat and let the roux cool before gradually mixing it with the hot stock for your sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that coats flour and carries flavor, giving the roux its smooth, rich base.
All-purpose flour
Starch that thickens the sauce once cooked in fat and hot liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour without browning. A blond roux is cooked only until the flour loses its raw taste while staying pale. Too much heat browns the flour, which changes the color and flavor and reduces its thickening power.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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