How To Make A Roux Thickening Agent With Butter and….. No Roux Recipe

Video – How To Make A Roux Thickening Agent With Butter

Since Chef Todd with WebCookingClasses.com cooks by method and doesn’t use recipes, we have included the written transcript of his ‘How to make a roux thickening agent with butter’ video.

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“My grandma, your grandma, everybody’s ma used corn starch slurry for a thickener; right, the turkey comes out of the oven, and you got the drippings in the bottom. You strain those drippings and you use that cornstarch slurry. The thing that I hate about the corn starch slurry is that is makes Thanksgiving turkey taste like Chinese food to me. It’s glassine; it’s got a tough mouth feel. You know we’ve already eaten pies and crab dip… what’s the hurt of a little more butter.”

Cooking by Method.. using no Roux Recipe

Here is how to make a roux thickening agent with butter.

“So, let’s go ahead and make a roux. I’m going to show you how to make a roux ahead of time and store it so then you can just crumble it into any kind of liquid. With a bunch of melted butter on the stove I can go ahead and start adding a little bit of flower to it. I’m not measuring cause I normally don’t.”  (No roux recipe here)  “And since they sent me the pans let’s go ahead and try and wreck them up. Let’s use a metal whisk in a metal pan and combine that butter and flour. Until we get something that looks like that. Kind of like wall paper paste. You know, like really thick gooey sludgy kind of thing. Not dry. Not grainy. Not crumbly. But a roux. This combination of fat and starch is what is going to thicken liquid for us in the future. So we want something just like that. A little runnier isn’t bad; but it won’t thicken as well.”

“Now that we’ve got the butter and the flour combined the next thing that we want to do is cook out a lot of the protein in the flour. And that’s what gives us really pasty, really floury tasting sauce is the proteins in the flour. So, you start to see in my roux here where it starts to go from yellow to white. And where some of these bubbles are you can see it start to turn white. This is when you know the proteins are starting to cook out. And if I smell a little bit it starts to smell kind of nutty. Kind of toasty nutty.”

“Now I can brown it to make a brown roux, and if you prefer your gravy darker.. your turkey gravy darker, you want to go ahead and keep cooking it. But, a brown roux has half the thickening power as a blonde roux, so you don’t want to cook it too much, or you want to make twice as much roux. But, as soon as I see it go from more yellow to white I know a lot of the proteins have been cooked out and I can go ahead and reserve this roux, put it aside… and show you how to use it for later.”

“And now I can go ahead with my pre-made roux and get a ramekin, or ah, let it cool a little bit before you put it in plastic or Tupperware or something like that. And using my rubber spatula… go ahead and scrape this and refrigerate it. Hm, that’s really something… how clean that pan comes out.”

Voila… roux recipe by method

Now That’s  How to Make a Roux – Quick and Easy

“And here is my container of roux, this cooked down butter and flour mixture that’s going to enable me to thicken thanksgiving turkey gravy, holiday gravy. Any kind of broth au jus that I have I can go ahead and use my roux for the au jus.  And thicken it… much better flavor. The butter… much better flavor than that corn starch slurry that Grandma always uses.”

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Many thanks to Chef Todd Mohr of WebCookingClasses.com for this video on how to make a roux thickening agent with butter without using a roux recipe.

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Filed under: Chef Todd Mohr • Dips and Sauces Recipes • Home Gourmet Cooking • Sauce Pan Recipes • Videos • What's Cooking With The Chefs?

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