So I browned a roast today to go in the slow cooker. I covered it with flour and then cooked it over medium high heat after heating up a mixture of butter and oil in the pan. Afterward, the pan had a lot of brown residue. After the pan cooled, I tasted it, and now I want to put in a stick of butter and a half a cup of flower and make me some RESIDUE! Because that stuff was DELICIOUS!
So, really, why do we bother with gravies and sauces and stuff when you can just brown some flower in butter and/or oil and have you some DELICIOUS stuff? Anything else is, IMHO, just gilding the White Lily.
Seems to me that what you’re describing (assuming you mean “flour”, finely-ground grain, rather than “flower” the reproductive structures of angiosperm plants) is “gravy”.
Meat juice, containing a variable amount of browned meat residue and melted fat, thickened by the introduction of a starch (flour, cornstarch, etc.)
The butter is just an additional fat, and does bring a nice flavor. We get the same effect with butter-basting roasting turkey and then making gravy from the drippings.
Developing *fond *on cooked meats (and some meat-like foods) is the key to getting full, rich, deep flavor out of the dish. Nearly ALL of the flavor develops in that deeply-browned layer. You want to recover it back into the dish by scraping the pan. If nothing else, put a half-cup of water in the pan, scrape and wash loose all the color, and then separate the juice for a good pan sauce.
You can gently cook a steak all the way to well-done and it won’t taste as good as if you got a good, brown/char layer on the outside. Same for pretty much all other cooked meat.
Actually, I make gravy from butter, flour and milk and then add some dry rub my wife has developed for flavoring. But when flour and butter alone taste so good … what’s the point?
In my opinion, you need the meat juice as well. Not sure if you can go to the store and get some nice meat juice. (I know there’s maybe been a discussion here about what that stuff is, you know, the red stuff that leaks out of your steak, that contrary to popular belief is not really blood, right? IIRC it has a specific name).
Just butter and flour is roux. But from your description, you picked up a lot of flavor from the roast you were browning as well. Pure roux is pretty bland.
I don’t really understand the OP. The first paragraph is all about how excellent it tastes when you brown meat, and the second paragraph asks why you bother with the meat.
