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Sauce

White Roux

A roux made with butter and flour, cooked slowly to form a thin paste.

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. Warm the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Drain off any buttermilk or water.

  3. Gradually add flour using a dredger to form a thin paste.

  4. Stir continuously over the heat for 15 minutes, ensuring it does not change color.

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 fat to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the mixture as its starch swells when combined with the warm fat.

The step that matters

Keep the roux from changing color. Cooking the flour and fat over low heat with constant stirring keeps the roux pale and prevents scorching. Its thickening power is strongest when it is not browned, and uneven heat can burn it quickly.

“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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