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Veloute Sauce

Velouté sauce is a smooth, white stock-based sauce thickened with a roux and finished with butter or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Veloute Sauce

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 ↓

Veloute Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the sifted flour and cook gently without browning.

Simmer and strain

  1. Moisten with the white stock.

  2. Add the bay leaf and peppercorns, then stir and simmer slowly for 40 minutes.

  3. Skim off any scum that forms.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine cloth.

Finish

  1. Return to the saucepan and finish with the remaining butter or thick cream.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies its main flavour.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a silkier texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Cook the roux without browning. Flour cooked gently with butter thickens smoothly and stays pale; browning changes the colour and flavour and weakens the thickening power, so keep the heat low and stir constantly.

“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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