The single most important sauce technique you can learn—how to make a proper roux, why it matters, and how professionals use it to create everything from béchamel to gumbo.
If there's one technique that separates cooks who make good sauces from cooks who make great sauces, it's knowing how to make a proper roux.
A roux is absurdly simple—just flour and fat cooked together—but it's the foundation of countless classic dishes: béchamel, velouté, cheese sauce, gumbo, étouffée, sawmill gravy, and more. Master the roux, and you've unlocked an entire category of cooking.
But here's the thing: most home cooks either don't know how to make a roux at all, or they make it wrong—raw-tasting flour, lumpy sauce, burnt bits, grainy texture. In 24 years of professional cooking, I've made thousands of gallons of roux-based sauces. Let me show you the right way—the professional way—so your sauces are always smooth, flavorful, and perfectly thickened.
A roux (pronounced "roo") is equal parts fat and flour cooked together to create a thickening agent for sauces, soups, and stews. That's it. Two ingredients, one technique, infinite applications.
The science: Flour contains starch granules. When you heat starch in fat, it gelatinizes—the granules swell and thicken liquid. But raw flour tastes terrible. By cooking the flour in fat first, you:
The basic ratio: 1:1 by weight. Equal parts fat and flour. That's the classic French technique, and it works perfectly every time.
Restaurant Reality: The Line Cook's First Lesson
At Purple Café, one of the first things you learned as a new line cook was how to make a proper blonde roux for béchamel. Not because it's difficult, but because it teaches you patience, attention, and heat control—the foundations of professional cooking. I watched new cooks rush it, burn it, or walk away and ruin an entire batch. The Chef would make them start over until they got it right. "If you can't make a roux," he'd say, "you can't work my line." Why? Because a roux-based sauce is on almost every menu. Cheese sauce, cream sauce, gravy, soup bases—they all start with a roux. Get this right, and you've got a fundamental building block for hundreds of dishes. The lesson: Mastery of fundamentals isn't optional. It's the foundation everything else is built on.
Roux is classified by color and cooking time. Each has different uses and flavor profiles:
Equipment:
Ingredients:
Heat your pan over medium heat. Add butter and let it melt completely. It should foam slightly but not brown. If using oil, just heat until shimmering.
When the fat is melted, add all the flour at once. Immediately start whisking to combine. The mixture will look like wet sand or paste—that's normal.
Whisk constantly over medium heat. You're looking for:
Either use immediately (for hot sauces) or cool completely before storing (refrigerate up to a week, freeze up to 3 months).
That's it. Two ingredients, 3 minutes, perfect foundation for béchamel or any white sauce.
For a medium-thick sauce (like classic béchamel), use this ratio:
3 tablespoons roux : 1 cup liquid
That's about 1.5 tbsp butter + 1.5 tbsp flour per cup of milk. Want thicker? Use 4-5 tablespoons roux per cup. Want thinner? Use 2 tablespoons per cup. Why this matters: Most recipes don't tell you the ratio—they just give amounts. Understanding the ratio means you can scale any sauce up or down and adjust thickness to your preference.
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The cause: Hot roux + hot liquid added too fast, or not enough whisking.
The fix:
The cause: Didn't cook the roux long enough before adding liquid.
The fix: Once sauce is made, simmer it longer (10-15 minutes) to cook out the raw flour taste. For next time, cook your roux 1-2 minutes longer.
The cause: Heat too high, not stirring constantly, or walked away.
The fix: There is no fix. Burnt roux tastes bitter and acrid. Throw it out and start over. Burnt roux ruins everything it touches.
Before you start:
During cooking:
When making sauce:
After 24 years in professional kitchens, I can tell you this: if you can make a proper roux, you can make almost any sauce.
It's not complicated. It's not difficult. It just requires:
Get this right and you've unlocked béchamel, cheese sauce, gravy, gumbo, cream soups, velouté, and dozens of other foundations. Every professional chef makes roux-based sauces weekly—many daily. It's that fundamental.
The next time you make mac and cheese, skip the packet and make a real cheese sauce from a proper roux. Or make biscuits and gravy with a blonde roux and watch how much better it tastes than the jarred stuff. Or spend 40 minutes making a dark roux for authentic gumbo.
Once you've tasted the difference, you'll never go back to shortcuts.
That's the power of mastering fundamentals. Welcome to better sauces.
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Professional Chef • 24 Years Professional Kitchen Experience
Professional chef with 24 years of restaurant experience including Pizzaiolo at Purple Café, Kitchen Manager at Mellow Mushroom, and line positions at Feierabend, Il Pizzaiolo, and Paragary's. A.A.S. Culinary Arts from Seattle Central College, B.S. Business Administration from University of Montana. Every product tested through real professional kitchen use or extensive long-term home testing.
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