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Roux, Brown

A thickened sauce base made by cooking butter and flour until a bright brown color.

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 ↓

Roux, Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Dissolve the butter in a saucepan and skim off the impurities.

  2. Let it stand for a minute, then pour away the clear oily part.

Make the roux

  1. Place the clear butter over low heat and gradually add the flour to make a thick paste.

  2. Stir constantly and heat slowly until the mixture is very thick and a bright brown color.

Store

  1. Store the roux in a jar and stir a spoonful 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
Carries the flour's starch and adds richness and a nutty flavor as it cooks.
Fine flour
Its starch thickens the butter into a paste that later thickens soup or gravy.

The step that matters

Heating the roux slowly while stirring constantly. Flour starch scorches easily over high heat, which gives a bitter taste. Gentle heat and constant stirring let the flour toast evenly to a bright brown while keeping its 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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