I just made beef stew. To thicken it, I mixed flour with water to make a smooth paste. To do otherwise would lead to little clumps of flour.
What do you call this thickening stuff? A Broulee? Something else? A Roux?
A roux is usually made with flour and fat. Alton Brown calls a mixture of flour and water a slurry, though I don’t know if that is a standard term.
A slurry is a mixture of corn starch (well, any starch) and a liquid.
Thank you.
I call a mixture of flour and water paste. If you start with paste, you’ll end with paste. Make a roux instead.
As Fear says, it’s not a traditional roux, although it’s sometimes called a cowboy roux. It’s also not a buerre manie’, which is butter and flour mixed together. Either of these is preferable to flour and water. In the future, you might use a corn starch/water mixture, as it is taste-neutral.
Next time you make stew, post in Cafe Society and we’ll talk.
Yeah, I was gonna say slurry. Did you shake it up in a baby food jar, like Martha Stewart says you should?
I call it a slurry as well. Makes no difference if it’s flour, cornstarch or arrowroot.
A roux, OTOH, is flour cooked in butter. The darker you cook it, the stronger its flavor gets, but its thickening power reduces. At its lightest, a roux will have about the same thickening power as the flour and water slurry, and a brick roux has very little thickening ability, but a lot of flavor. It’s also about five seconds away from burnt - brick roux is challenging to produce.
And, for completeness, Crème brûlée is completely unrelated; it’s a desert custard with a burnt sugar crust; brûlée means burnt. The only Broulee I can find is a small country town in my state, which I had never heard of before.