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Roux

A brown roux made by cooking flour and butter until it turns brown.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in an enamelled pan and skim off any sediment.

  2. Slowly add the flour while stirring continuously.

  3. Once boiling and starting to color, stir more quickly and remove from heat if boiling too fast.

  4. If desired, add one or two slices of onion when boiling, then remove from heat and stir until bubbling stops.

Store

  1. Pour off the thick liquid and let it cool before storing in small jars.

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

Fine flour
Forms the thickening base that gives the roux its body when cooked with fat.
Butter
Provides the fat that coats the flour particles and carries flavor through the cooking.

The step that matters

Stirring while the roux colors. Once the mixture starts to color it can darken and scorch quickly, so stirring continuously and removing it from heat when boiling too fast helps it brown 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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