I was trying to make a cheese souffle the other day and started, as most recipes said, with a roux, which is a kind of base sauce. I melted 3 tablespoons of butter and added 3 tablespoons of flour.
However, instead of turning into a sauce, the flour immediately began to clump up and form dough! I quickly added in the milk and kept stirring it, and eventually the dough “melted” and turned back into a sauce, but none of the other recipes warned me about that!? What did I do wrong with the flour and butter? Was it supposed to be hotter? More butter? I’m pretty sure it was 3 tablespoons of each…
You failed to be patient. The flour and butter clump first, and you need to keep stirring them and let them bubble and brown a bit before you add the milk. By doing it your way, you probably didn’t get as much flavor from the browned flour/butter (although you probably also maximized its thickening power).
When the clumping happens I usually add a little more oil. A roux doesn’t have to be butter-based or even all butter. The whole idea is to suspend the individual flour particles in the molten fat to PREVENT clumping in the final sauce. Also turn your heat down so as to not scorch the roux. It should be a homogeneous sort of bubbly mass in the pan. For a souffle you want little or no color (=carmelization) on the roux, since you are going to put milk or cream (THEN the cheese) into it, and you want a nice clean appearance.
You need to thoroughly mix the flour and butter, but it can be thick and dough like. You can even mix roux ahead of time, refrigerate it, and stir into liquid later to form a sauce.
That’s normal. When all you have is butter and flour, your roux isn’t a sauce yet. It only needs to be smooth enough that you can spread it around the pan and cook it evenly. If it’s too solid of a ball, add more butter or oil. The idea here is that you want to coat each individual granule of flour with fat, so they don’t clump when you add the liquid. The longer you cook it at this stage, the better it will taste (raw flour is pretty yuck) but the less thickening power it will have (the starches break down).
It may be easier for you if you incorporate the flour into the butter slowly. Assuming you measured correctly, a 1:1 ratio should be fine. Incorporate in a few batches while whisking continuously. You shouldn’t get anything dry enough to call a “dough,” but it will be much thicker than a finished sauce. If it is to pasty, just follow the advice of the other posters and add a bit more oil.
I was thinking of how to prevent this from happening in the future. What if I just mix the butter and milk together first so I’d get a lot of liquid, and then add the flour last? Would that work?
No. The whole reason for doing this is that the dry flour will clump in water, and will be difficult, if not impossible to smooth out. The exact proportions of flour to oil and the consistency aren’t that important if you’re not browning it. Just stir the roux until it’s well mixed before adding other liquids. For a white sauce you have to be careful, but I usually get the pan and the roux nice and hot before adding liquid. Then add the liquid a little at a time and stir until smooth before adding more. You then need to heat the sauce just below the boiling point for several minutes, stirring constantly to maintain even heat, to get the full thickening effect, and get rid of floury taste.
No. Just mix and add more fat if it’s looking way too thick to you. But be patient and use medium-low heat while you’re doing it.
You want to add flour to fat to get a homogenous mixture that spreads evenly in the liquid, which you add later. Mixing the fat and flour together helps prevent clumping. Also, (and more importantly) you are cooking out the raw flour flavor and toasting it ever so slightly (in a blonde roux, which is what a souffle usually requires–roux used in Cajun or Creole dishes are often cooked to dark brown stages), so you’re also adding a bit of flavor to it, too.
You can make a thickened mixture your way, too, but it would be called a slurry and it doesn’t require any oil. You take a little bit of cold liquid, add it to flour in a cup or bowl, and whisk it with a fork or whisk until it’s completely dissolved and not clumping. Adding flour to a hot liquid will form clumps. You then toss this mixture into your heated liquid.
But you don’t want to deal with a slurry for a souffle. Just do the recipe as is; the roux is the easy part of a souffle, and is easily fixed by adding more oil if it really is way too thick.
Sounds like you did it exactly right. Check out this video for examples of how it should look. I’ve made 'em even more thick than the video shows. As long as when you add the liquid it evens out and there’s no lumps, you’re fine.
Cooking the flour in the fat adds flavor. For a white sauce, you want to cook it hardly at all. But you can keep cooking the roux darker and darker, and the darker it gets the more toasty flavor it adds to the dish. However, the darker it gets the less effective it is at thickening.
You CAN make a sauce/gravy simply by mixing flour with a bit of liquid, if you don’t add much liquid you can thoroughy mix it without getting lumps. Then add the slurry to whatever other ingredients and cook to thicken. However, this won’t add the fat and flavor you get with a roux.
When making a roux-based sauce or gravy, you really do need to simmer the roux before adding the liquid. The flour needs to cook for a bit to lose the raw, wallpaper-paste flavor. If you keep the heat low and stir it frequently, it won’t brown while it cooks during this period.
The darker roux is a part of the flavor of the finished dish, often in Creole cooking. I crack up at Emeril’s instructions in cooking roux: one beer, two beer, or three beer roux. You simmer it long enough to drink the number of beers. Three beer roux is the darkest. The rest of the six pack are poured on the roux and incorporated in the sauce.