Skip to main content
Main

Brown Thickening

A brown roux made by cooking butter and flour, then adding stock to thicken sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Brown Thickening

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

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

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until the mixture turns a deep brown color.

Finish the gravy

  1. Gradually add the stock, stirring constantly to avoid lumps.

  2. Use the brown thickening to make gravy, adding ingredients like mushroom ketchup or sherry as needed.

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 gives the roux its rich, nutty fat base.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce once cooked, and cooking it longer deepens the color and flavor.
Stock
Forms the liquid that the roux thickens into a smooth gravy.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until deep brown. Flour must cook long enough to lose its raw taste and darken, but burns quickly once it is dark. Stirring constantly over medium heat keeps the roux even in color and flavor.

“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