Skip to main content
Main

French Thickening, or Brown Roux

A roux made by melting butter and adding flour to create a brown thickening agent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter over low heat and skim off any impurities.

  2. Let the butter settle, then pour it into a clean frying pan over low heat.

  3. Gradually add the flour while shaking the pan frequently.

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

Store and use

  1. Store in a jar and stir in a spoonful or two into boiling 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 and adds richness and a nutty flavor as it cooks.
Flour
Its starch thickens liquids once the roux is stirred into soup or gravy.

The step that matters

Stir constantly until the mixture turns a clear light brown color.. Flour scorches quickly over heat, and constant stirring keeps it cooking evenly. Cooking longer deepens the color and nutty flavor but weakens thickening power, so stop at the stated light brown.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes