Why does roux work

Great question! Dark brown roux contains a lot of fat and there is really nothing to hold on to it, especially after the flour has lost all its thickening and holding power by being so browned. Therefore, it is almost unavoidable that some or a large part of the fat separates. Fat tends to be an important carrier of flavour in dishes, so getting rid of it, will change the flavour profile.

Browning the chicken and sausage will provide all the color you need. I bake my flour in the oven to get it dark brown. Two beers and wal — La! Pull roux out of oven and go on to the gumbo stage. Add Comment.

Post Comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Making a dark roux The basis for a gumbo is definitely the dark roux. Instructions Take a pot with a thick bottom, you'll be heating this up to quite high temperatures so you want it to be able to handle it. I prefer using a pot, versus a frying pan to avoid any possible splattering. Also, you'll probably want to add the other ingredients for your dish, gumbo for instance, so make sure it's large enough.

Does this answer your question? What is the advantage of a roux over a raw flour slurry, in sauce? There is one way you can "just add flour to milk", which is with the milk cold, and using a blender or powered mixer to break up the lumps. This is what one does for crepe batter. Presumably such a mixture could also be cooked into a sauce, although I've never seen one. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

Community Bot 1. Benjamin Kuykendall Benjamin Kuykendall 2, 11 11 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges. Thank you for a great answer. Incidentally, it's interesting to observe the clumping and surface gelatinization when one heats flour with water say in equal quantities. Okay, there's no culinary use, but flour is cheap. MarkWildon You're right, you can observe this directly; it is a unique texture for sure.

But there is indeed a culinary use! A tangzhong or "water roux" of gelatinized flour is used in Chinese baking to retain moisture and make pillowy soft bread. Try it out! For example, say we were discussing cognac, one could say, oh, there's also champage, different technique - there's no sense at all in which method champ.

It's incredibly difficult to get roux to turn out correctly, but then, that's true of many things. You start by bringing part of the milk to boil and in parallel prepare a slurry of the flour or starch in the remaining milk. Then quickly stir the slurry in the hot milk. Show 6 more comments. This is of course completely correct. You can't make sauce with "flour and milk" and more than you can make a pasta dish with "flour and water".

Fattie: of course you can use this to make sauces. It's just not bechamel sauce. From there, the length of cooking time determines the darkness of the roux and thus the flavour of the final product. The roux for sauce espagnole is browned to a light tan known in French as roux , and roux for Cajun and Creole dishes are cooked to a dark chocolatey brown paste that can easily end up charred in the hands of an inexperienced cook.

The science behind it Two things happen when starch molecules come into contact with water. They absorb the water and swell up which helps to thicken sauces , but this swelling also makes them bind together, forming small clumps of dough - not ideal for a smooth sauce. Frying the flour helps keep the individual particles separated by a coating of fat, so that when the water is added, the starch molecules can swell independently, aided by constant stirring.

The starch particles then slide past each other rather than clumping up, giving rise to a smooth consistency. Written by Stephanie Lim. Dining In Dining In 5 minutes. A meaty story for carnivores Dining In 2 minutes.

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