Making a roux · The World Table

On the Path of Study: Semester 10: The Restaurateur's Capstone

From the Lexicon, Roux, Slurry & Liaison

The thickener's toolkit. ROUX: equal weights flour and fat cooked together: white (2 min) for béchamel, blond for velouté, brown to brick-dark for gumbo, each stage trading thickening power for flavor. SLURRY: cornstarch or arrowroot in cold water, whisked into simmering liquid at the end: instant gloss, Asian-sauce standard, breaks down if boiled long. LIAISON: egg yolk and cream tempered in off the heat: the silk finish of blanquette and avgolemono; boil it and you've made sweet scrambled regret. BEURRE MANIÉ: raw butter-flour paste whisked in at the finish, the braise-rescuer. Choose by the sauce's temperature future, not habit.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.

Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.

A chosen film How to Make a Roux Like a Pro | Food Network Food Network Watch for: The color ladder in the pan, white to blond to brown, and how the roux loosens and smells nutty as it darkens, which is the trade of thickening power for flavor happening in real time.