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Blonde and Brown Roux

A roux made by cooking butter and flour to produce a blonde or brown base.

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 ↓

Blonde and Brown Roux

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over moderate heat.

  2. Add the sifted flour to the melted butter.

  3. Stir continuously until the mixture turns a light blonde color for blonde roux.

  4. For brown roux, continue cooking until it reaches a darker color.

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
Carries fat that coats the flour and keeps the roux smooth and rich.
Flour
Starch that thickens liquids once cooked, with toasting deepening color and flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring while the roux cooks. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly so the flour toasts without scorching. Scorched flour turns bitter and dark, and cannot be rescued, so the color must be watched closely.

“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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