A More Foolproof Way to Make Dark Roux? (Patreon)

I was doomscrolling on Instagram yesterday and came across an excellent post from Louisiana Chef Adriánna Guillory-Bellow. It's a slow, deeply-explained tutorial on how to make a proper dark roux for gumbo.

Anyone who's made gumbo or know anything about the process knows that the roux is the trickiest part. But why is that? Making a roux is easy, right? Just cook some flour in oil or butter over moderate heat before stirring in your liquid.

The difficulty with gumbo comes down to the color of the roux. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of you have made a roux, it was a blond or perhaps lightly nutty brown roux destined for a béchamel or a gravy or maybe a chicken pot pie. For proper gumbo, on the other hand, you need to cook the roux until it is a deep, dark, 85% cacao-level chocolatey brown. It's that tiny window where you've maximized those deep, rich, browned flavors you're after but you've yet to introduce any bitterness or burnt notes.

This is not easy. To make a dark roux the traditional way, you need to cook over very low, slow, consistent heat while stirring near-constantly to ensure that your roux is browning evenly throughout the entire process.

"But can't you just let it sit for a few minutes in between stirs, like a risotto?" you might ask. Unfortunately, you cannot. Because flour browns so easily, if you let your roux sit in the pot un-stirred for even a few minutes, the layer of flour on the bottom will start to darken.

"So what's the big deal? Can't you just stir it back in and sort of 'even out' the color?" you may reasonably follow up.

Unfortunately, also no. The bitter flavors from a burnt roux are very powerful. Even a bit of burnt flour can taint the entire batch. By giving some of the flour a head-start on toasting by letting it sit for too long at the bottom of the pan then stirring it back into the rest of the roux, you may be able to cook it down to a roux that looks deep, dark brown, but in reality some of those particles of flour are more toasted than others. What looks like a uniform color is actual made up of a combination of flour that is not cooked enough, and flour that is burnt. The result is a roux that tastes simultaneously bitter and underdeveloped.

Chef Guillory-Bellow does a great job of showing exactly how to get a properly-developed, evenly cooked roux, and the answer is essentially: stir it and stir it and stir it some more over the course of its long, slow browning process.

But right after watching it, I immediately started thinking. We have many other cooking methods that heat and cook more evenly than a stovetop does (ovens, pressure cookers, or sous vide circulators, for example) so what if we could use one of these tools to render roux-making foolproof?I immediately texted my friend Chris Young—former development chef at The Fat Duck and Modernist Cuisine—to ask if he'd ever considered making roux in a pressure cooker using the method I've successfully used for caramelizing onions: put them in a sealed mason jar, then cook the jar in the pressure cooker for several hours.

Here's how the interaction went (please don't comment on my 213 unread messages, I'm still a good 287 off my goal of 500):

Could making a foolproof, no-stir roux be as easy as cooking it in a mason jar in a pressure cooker?I also spoke with my friend Grant Crilly of ChefSteps who suggested the upper limit on a pressure cooker may not be hot enough to get the level of browning we're looking for. Chris also pointed out that because there is no water inside the jars, the effects of a pressure cooker would not apply to an oil and flour roux.

A Frienji over on Instagram suggested making roux in the microwave. This makes sense. Microwaves penetrate foods faster than the infrared radiation (heat energy) we typically use for cooking, which means that anything cooked in that magic chamber will tend to heat through evenly.

This isn't great for steak or burgers or anything where you want a contrasting texture between the interior and exterior. But for something like roux, where even cooking is the goal, this is an approach worth testing.

Finally, my old friend Alex Talbot (OG food science blogger—shout out to Ideas in Food!) suggested what might, in fact, be the most practical approach I've heard: Don't toast the roux, just toast the flour. I'm thinking: Spread the flour on a sheet tray and toast until it's deep brown before using the browned flour to make a roux, with the idea that this will minimize the amount of time dedicated to stovetop pot-sitting.

So that leaves me with a few tests to do this week.:

Standard roux (the Chef Guillory-Bellow method)

Roux made with toasted flour

Roux in the pressure cooker

Roux made in the oven (mix flour and oil then roast)

Roux in the microwave

It'll be fun for me to see the results. If there's anything you want me to specifically test here, let me know in the comments and I'll add it to the agenda!

This has also made me realize I want to do a turkey gumbo recipe for November this year. Would anyone be interested in seeing that? (Don't worry, we'll have plenty of other turkey recipes on the site, too!)