Skip to main content
Dessert

Drawn Butter

Drawn butter is clarified butter made by melting butter with flour and water over indirect heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Combine

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour with the butter until well combined.

  2. Place the mixture in a saucepan with the water.

Melt gently

  1. Set the saucepan in a larger pan of boiling water.

  2. Stir until the butter melts and is nearly boiling, avoiding direct heat to prevent the butter from becoming oily.

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
Is the fat that melts and separates into clear butterfat, which is the finished product.

The step that matters

Melting over gentle, indirect heat. Butter is an emulsion of fat, water and milk solids. Direct high heat can scorch the milk solids and break the emulsion, leaving the fat oily and cloudy. A water bath keeps the temperature gentle so the water separates cleanly from the fat.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes