Skip to main content
Main

White Roux, for Thickening White Sauces

A roux made with butter and flour used to thicken white sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

White Roux, for Thickening White Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

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

  2. Gradually add the flour, stirring continuously until it turns a light brown color.

  3. Be careful not to let it burn, as this will make the sauce bitter.

Store

  1. Once ready, pour it into a jar and let it cool for storage.

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
Melts to form the fat base that coats the flour and carries flavor through the roux.
Flour
Its starch thickens the fat when heated, giving the roux its body for sauces.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour until light brown without burning. Heat browns and toasts the starch, and scorched flour turns bitter and spoils the flavor of the finished sauce. Constant stirring over low heat keeps the color even and prevents hot spots.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes