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Sauce

Brown Roux

A roux made by browning butter and flour, then adding boiling broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Heat the butter in a frying pan until it bubbles and browns, but do not let it burn.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

Finish the sauce

  1. Gradually pour in the boiling broth and mix well.

  2. Return the mixture to the soup kettle, boil once, and serve without straining out the vegetables.

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 browns.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated in the fat.
Broth
Supplies the liquid that the roux thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter without burning it. Browning the butter and flour together builds nutty, toasted flavor. Past that point the fat and flour scorch, which gives a bitter taste that the finished dish cannot hide.

“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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