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Sauce

Roux Brun

A brown roux made by browning flour and butter to thicken sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 Brun

thickens 2 cups of sauce or 1 pint of soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter slowly in a saucepan.

  2. Sprinkle in the flour and stir over low heat until uniformly browned, about 25 minutes.

  3. Be careful not to scorch the mixture, as it will taste bitter.

  4. This roux will thicken 2 cups of sauce or 1 pint of soup.

Thicken the sauce

  1. Ensure the sauce to be thickened is strong and well-flavored, then strain it.

  2. Gradually stir the sauce into the roux, which should be slightly cooled.

  3. Return the saucepan to heat and boil for 3 to 4 minutes until the sauce is rich, smooth, and thickened as desired.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Starch that thickens the sauce and, as it browns, adds a nutty, toasted flavour.
Butter
Fat that carries the flour and coats the starch so it blends smoothly into liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the flour over low heat. Flour browns slowly and can scorch quickly, and scorched starch turns bitter. Keeping the heat low and stirring constantly lets the roux colour evenly without burning.

“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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