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Sauce

White Roux

A roux made with butter and flour, used to thicken sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

White Roux

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt some butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in enough flour to create a thick paste.

  3. Stir continuously over heat with a wooden spoon until very hot.

  4. Remove from heat and store for use in thickening sauces or ragouts.

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 flavour, giving a smooth, rich base.
Flour
Its starch thickens the fat into a paste that later swells and thickens liquids.

The step that matters

Stirring continuously over heat. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and keeps the flour from scorching or clumping. Scorched flour turns brown and bitter, and lumps resist smooth thickening later.

“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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