Skip to main content
Sauce

White Roux

A roux made by cooking butter and flour together for 10 to 15 minutes without browning.

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 ↓

White Roux

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over low heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 10 to 15 minutes without allowing it to color.

  3. If using immediately, let the roux cool slightly before adding liquid.

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
Provides fat that coats the flour and carries flavor into the roux.
Flour
Starch that thickens the liquid it is later mixed with once cooked.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour without coloring it. Cooking over low heat for 10 to 15 minutes cooks out the raw flour taste while keeping the roux pale. If it browns, it becomes a darker roux with less thickening power and a different flavor, so keep the heat low and stir steadily.

“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