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Sauce

Liaison Au Roux

A roux is a butter and flour mixture used as a thickening agent.

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 ↓

Liaison Au Roux

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

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

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Cook on a low fire, stirring occasionally, until the mixture turns a light mahogany color.

Store

  1. Allow to cool and store in the larder for future use.

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 the flour and adds richness and a nutty flavor as it cooks.
Flour
Its starch thickens the fat and, as it cooks, gives the roux its color and toasty flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour to mahogany color. Cooking over low heat with steady stirring toasts the flour evenly. Too little stirring or too much heat can scorch the starch, leaving a bitter taste and dark specks.

“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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