A Roux Adventure. . .

In the past, I've stirred together flour and water or flour and milk, which I was told was a roux, to thicken gravy. Now I've discovered that a roux is actually composed of fat and flour, and has a more interesting purpose. To thicken gumbo, other soups or even spaghetti sauce and add some richness to the finished flavor. It goes through stages of deepening color, depending on how long you want to stand there, cooking and stirring.

Today, for my second official roux, I wanted a brown one to thicken my current version of Hungarian Mushroom Soup. I committed to the whole 20 minutes; but alas, in the end; it was just to the golden stage. I'm excited to experiment more with different fats, possibly solid coconut oil, definitely my Moroccan EVOO, and maybe bacon fat. The first roux I made, a week or so ago, using ghee and flour. It browned up within 10 minutes! Very brown! This will be a fun learning adventure!

After making chicken bone broth, I decided to use half butter and half filtered chicken fat for todays roux.

2oz. butter

2oz. filtered chicken fat

1/2c all purpose flour

Put these in a heavy bottomed 1 quart pot over low-medium heat. Whisk together and continue to whisk until you get to the color you want.

Color can range from light yellow-brown, to golden brown, to brown. The darker it is, the deeper and richer the flavor will be.

I decided a good way to make this ahead is to freeze it in tiny containers (and sometimes you have to eat a little bit of ice cream to get to the perfect ones 😉) then pop the frozen disks into little plastic bags and into a quart freezer bag. 

Now they're ready to drop into whatever savory dish you're making that needs a bit of thickening. Such fun! . .Lin