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French Thickening ; Or, Brown Roux

A roux made by cooking butter and flour until a light 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 ↓

French Thickening ; Or, Brown Roux

Ingredients

Directions

Clarify the butter

  1. Melt the butter over low heat in a clean frying pan.

  2. Once melted, remove from heat and let it settle.

  3. Carefully pour the clear butter into the frying pan, leaving sediment behind.

Make the roux

  1. Over low heat, gradually add the flour to the butter, shaking the pan often.

  2. Stir constantly until the mixture turns a clear light brown color.

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

Unsalted butter
Provides the fat that carries the flour and adds rich, nutty flavor as it browns.
All-purpose flour
Forms the thickening base, with its starch cooking into the fat and gradually browning.

The step that matters

Browning the flour over low heat. Flour can scorch quickly once it starts to brown, and scorched starch tastes bitter. Low heat and constant stirring let it color evenly and develop a toasty flavor before it burns.

“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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