Skip to main content
Sauce

Roux Brun

A brown roux is made by cooking butter and flour together until dark.

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir continuously with a wooden spoon.

  3. Cook until the mixture turns a deep brown color, ensuring no lumps form.

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
Thickens the butter into a roux and, as it cooks and browns, adds nutty, toasted flavor.
Butter
Carries the flour and conducts heat, letting the roux cook evenly without scorching.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux to deep brown. Stirring constantly over medium heat keeps the flour cooking evenly. Browning builds nutty flavor, but too much heat or too long scorches the starch and gives a bitter taste, so the color must be watched closely.

“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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes