Roux Recipe: The Secret to Incredible, Flavorful Creole Meals
It is made by cooking together equal parts flour and fat by weight until the mixture becomes brown in color. You can use any type of fat in roux but it needs to be cooked at low temperatures so as not to burn the flour.
Methods
Many of the roux recipes you’ll find call for using a heavy-bottomed pot. This is important, because it helps prevent scorching. Also, if your pot is large enough and deep enough to hold about 3⁄4 cup liquid per cup flour (that’s 1 tablespoon per teaspoon), then you’ll be able to stir your roux without having it stick to the bottom or sides of the pan.
If you’re cooking a lot of roux at once, then it makes sense to use a whisk rather than a wooden spoon—it will cut down on stirring time by half! And while we’re on that topic: using a thermometer will help ensure that you don’t overheat your oil (which can result in burning) or underheat it (which means not enough browning). If all goes according to plan, this should lead right up until adding oil into ingredients.
Special Notes
Roux is a base for many Southern dishes, including gumbo and jambalaya. Both of these dishes are thickened with roux, which is made by cooking flour and oil together until it turns brown. When making gumbo or jambalaya, you’ll want to cook your roux for about 30 minutes in order to get the right color and flavor. You can also use this dark brown mixture as a base for other sauces such as etouffee or gumbos.
Roux is a mixture of equal parts flour and fat by weight.
Roux is a mixture of equal parts flour and fat by weight. It’s used in Cajun cooking to thicken sauces, and it’s especially important when making gumbo or jambalaya because they’re both heavily seasoned with roux.
It’s easy to make your own roux at home! All you need is some flour and some oil, though it’s helpful if you have a whisk so that the mixture doesn’t burn on the bottom of your pot. Just heat up your oil (how much depends on how much sauce you’re making) until it starts to bubble but hasn’t fully heated up yet; then add about twice as much flour as there is oil (so if you’ve got 1 cup of oil, use 2 cups of flour). Whisk constantly until everything is blended together well—this will take about five minutes—then set aside to cool before adding any additional ingredients like butter or stock/broth
The fat can be oil, bacon drippings, lard or butter.
Lard is the best choice because it has a high smoke point (the temperature at which a substance starts to turn brown and burn). Bacon drippings are also good but if you don’t have any on hand, vegetable oil will do in a pinch. Butter is the least desirable because its smoke point is much lower than that of other fats like lard or bacon drippings.
That said, if you don’t have any of these available to use when making roux then it doesn’t matter as long as your oil isn’t overheated while cooking your roux – just be sure not to let your hot oil get too close to smoking!
The darker the roux—the longer it cooks—the more pronounced its flavor will be.
You may think you know what a roux is, but do you really? Roux is a cooked mixture of fat and flour that’s used as a base for soups, sauces and stews. The darker the roux—the longer it cooks—the more pronounced its flavor will be. The longer you cook the roux, the darker it gets. This can range from pale blond to dark brown depending on how long you allow this mixture to cook.
- The darker it gets, the stronger its flavor will be.
- The darker it gets (and therefore less thickening power has been developed), the more likely it is to burn if left unattended for too long in saucepans on high heat or over open flames on stovetops.
In summary, roux is a thickener used to make Cajun food.
