How to Make a Roux- Game of Thrones Food Recipes

Roux is a substance created by cooking wheat flour and fat (traditionally butter).

It is the thickening agent of three of the mother sauces of classical French cooking: béchamel sauce, velouté sauce, and espagnole sauce.

This is a wonderful trick to thicken your soups and stews. The flour works to thicken the broth, while the butter keeps the flour from becoming globby.

INGREDIENTS:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons flour

PROCEDURE:

Melt the butter in a pan, stirring gently until it just starts to bubble. Add flour and mix completely with the butter. Stir until the mixture turns golden brown, just a few minutes. Add a ladleful of your soup broth to the pan, whisking constantly. Then pour this entire mix back into your soup pot, stirring thoroughly until the roux is all dissolved.

How to Add Liquid to Create a Sauce

When combining roux with water-based liquids, such as broth or milk, many cooking experts assert it is important that these liquids are not excessively hot. It is preferable to add room temperature or warm roux to a moderately hot liquid, or vice versa, to avoid lumps. They should be added in small quantities while stirring, some experts asserting to briefly bring the temperature to boil. Conversely, some experts suggest that the combined mixture will never be lumpy if the roux itself is correctly made.

Alternatives

Cooks can substitute for roux by adding a mixture of water and wheat flour to a dish that needs thickening, since the heat of boiling water will release the starch from the flour; however, this temperature is not high enough to eliminate the floury taste. A mixture of water and flour used in this way is colloquially known as “cowboy roux”, and in modern cuisine it is called a white wash, but is used infrequently since it imparts a flavor to the finished dish that a traditional haute cuisine chef would consider unacceptable. 

Cornflour (known as cornstarch in the United States) can be used instead of wheat flour, as less is needed to thicken, and it imparts less of the raw flour taste, and it also makes the final sauce more shiny.

As an alternative to roux, which is high in fat and very energy-dense, some Creole chefs have experimented with toasting flour without oil in a hot pan as an addition to gumbo. Cornstarch mixed with water (slurry), arrowroot, and other agents can be used in place of roux as well. These items do not contribute to the flavor of a dish, and are used solely for thickening liquids. 

More recently, many chefs have turned to a group of naturally occurring chemicals known as hydrocolloids. In addition to being flavorless and possessing the ability to act as a thickening agent, the resulting texture is thought by some to be superior, and only a small amount is required for the desired effect.


Reference:

Have you tried Sanza Starks' favorite lemon cake, or Daenerys Targaryen mouth-watering honeyfingers. 

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