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Brown Roux

A brown roux is a thickened base made by cooking butter and flour until 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 ↓

Brown Roux

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Dissolve the butter in a saucepan and skim off the impurities, then let it stand for a minute.

  2. Pour away the clear oily part into a saucepan over low heat.

  3. Gradually add the flour, stirring constantly until it forms a thick paste.

  4. Continue to heat the mixture slowly until it turns a bright brown color.

Store and use

  1. Store the roux in a jar.

  2. Stir a spoonful of the roux into soup or gravy 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
Provides fat that coats the flour particles and carries flavor as it browns.
Fine flour
Its starch thickens the fat and, when heated, gives the roux its body.

The step that matters

Heating the roux slowly to brown. High heat can scorch the flour before it colors evenly, leaving a bitter taste. Slow, constant heat lets the starches and milk solids brown gradually, building nutty flavor while keeping the 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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