Beurre Manié

(Two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, beurre manié, photo by Donna.)

Beurre manié [bur mahn-YAY]: Butter into which an equal volume of flour has been rubbed and kneaded becomes an easy, effective way to thicken small amounts of sauces while also enriching them.  A slurry (cornstarch and water), may be quicker and more widely used, but it doesn’t enrich or add flavor.  Butter does.  Beurre manié is especially suited to thickening pan gravies, meat stews, fish stews, and the poaching liquid in which fish has cooked (sometimes called cuisson; see also shallow poach), and should be used a la minute, just before serving.

In other words, it’s uncooked roux and works the same way.  Fat separates the flour granules so that they remain separate as they expand to thicken a sauce.  Bob del Grosso posted some pix of this after some email we exchanged, there were some great comments about thickening generally, and then foodist was inspired to write a post about roux on Bob's site.

Flour-thickened sauces are beautiful if you prepare them thoughtfully, which means two things: adding the right amount of roux and eliminating the starchy feel from the sauce cooking it gently and skimming the gunk that collects on the surface.  I think roux got a bad name generally as French haute cuisine developed a reputation for being fat and heavy (fine cuisine should never feel heavy).   Roux does not make a sauce fat or heavy.  Indeed, it can be a healthful form of cooking.  The béchamel sauce, for instance, milk thickened with roux and flavored with aromats, is a great way to add creaminess to pastas without using huge amounts of cream and butter.  Moreover, milk is a kitchen staple and always on hand (unlike fresh stock, but I don’t want to get into that again!).

Chefs today tend more toward natural reductions.  Sounds nice, doesn’t it—“natural reductions.”  I find that too often natural reductions that are brought to sauce consistency are gluey on the palate.  Also, in terms of home cooking, flour thickening is more convenient.   I find that flour thickened sauces have a rich elegant feel if the starch is properly handled.

Someone on del Grosso’s post questioned the liaison.  I might have posted that as today’s element.  A liason, a mixture of yolk and cream (traditionally 1 yolk per half coup of cream), can be added to creamy stews to enrich them.  Liasons don’t have much thickening power given but give a creamy stew and incomparable velvety luxurious texture.  It is indeed another element of cooking commonly overlooked in today’s kitchens.

(Post script: David Leite, of Leite’s Culinaria, has posted what seems to be a reappraisal of my book, The Elements of Cooking.  David is a good and generous writer and the site he started has won many deserved awards, and I’m glad for his review.)

Comments

[Bob delGrosso]

A specific comment about the utility of beurre manie:

The reason why it is only used for "a la minute" sauces that will not be held before serving, is that after a few minutes of holding a sauce thickened with beurre manie will begin to thin out. Here's why.

Flour contains the enzyme amylase which catalyzes the breakdown of starch into simple sugars. This reaction is going on all the time in flour, but when you add water and warm it up it happens much faster. So concoctions like beurre manie and flour slurries (which are not used so much) are only used when we expect the sauce is going to be served right away.

If you want to use flour to thicken something that you want to hold for a long time you must denature the amylase at a fairly high temperature (I forget the exact temp range) typically before you add the flour to the water. This is of course, is one of the reasons why roux is cooked out with fat before it is added to liquid.

BTW, saliva also contains a starch digesting enzyme. So guess what happens to the viscosity of a sauce, soup or stew that is thickened with starch if you double dip while tasting?

I've seen entire batches of veloute fall apart during service bec. some wanker double dipped.

Even dry saliva will do this. So watch out!

Okay, now I feel queasy.

[Chad Edward]

Michael, the "Elements of Cooking" blog is so useful and informative, I can't believe you're giving it away gratuit. Thank you.

[Brad]

Bob-
Great info. The use amylase enzyme in flour (both barley and wheat) is also essential to brewing beer. Different temperatures will cause the enzymes to react differently and produce different types of sugars. The enzymes work best between 148F-160F and become denatured when held around 168F-170F.

[Connor]

I'm so glad you mentioned liaison. Not too long ago, my husband and I made Julia Child's chicken fricassee, which instructs you to make "the sauce" with 2 eggs yolks and 1/2 cup cream. Until reading your blog, however, I didn't have a great context for what we had made, nor did I know it's called liaison. The finished dish was delightful, in large part to its creaminess and richness. We both marveled at the dinner table that it was the first time we'd encountered this type of sauce in a recipe or in cooking with family and friends. It made us both want to delve deeper into sauces and more generally, increase our understanding of the fundamentals.

[John J. Goddard]

How do you get flour to stand up like that? ;)

I once had the misfortune of working a heavy saute station under a guy who insisted that any needed beurre manié would be made to order for each skillet. What a tool.

[Tags]

If a wanker double-dips, isn't that triple-dipping?

[catherine]

that butter looks gorgeous!

[KViz]

I often experiment with my sauces and don't know until late in the process whether or not they will need to be thickened. I have been using a slurry of corn starch...should I try a beurre manie? I'm concerned about the raw flour taste. Chef Bob...are you saying to cook the manie first -- before adding "ala minute"?

Thanks!

[Luis]

Yikes! I cooked a hardboiled egg per the elements... and it was as advertised yellow, not green. I shocked it with ice water and then I ate cold eggs...
Well long story short, today I looked up the word "shocked" in the book and... I was dissapointed. The short def is too short to be usefull to anybody. I am left wondering what "shocking" something really means as a technique. Well I hope this is not going to be the norm as I plow my way through this book. Better not be. This definition of a cooking technique is left wanting... just like Bourdain's ranting and ravings....

[Bob delGrosso]

Kviz

No, there is not much point in cooking the manie first and actually you may create other problems and make it worse. Here's why

Beurre manie is made with whole butter and flour. Whole butter contains water. If you cook it like roux the amylase in the presece of water will tear up the starch and diminish the manie's thickening power.

You'd be better off making up a big batch of blonde roux, and using that for last minute adjustments. Because roux is made with clarified butter and contains no water when made properly the enzyme is degraded and the starch remains intact.

To use roux a la minute, cook up a batch and roll it up in plastic into log for easy cutting. Then, when you need to thicken something cut off a chunk, chop it into tiny pieces and whisk them into the liquid as if your life depended on it.

The flour should disperse well because all of the starch is covered with fat so it is temporally impermeable to water and so won't gel and stick right away. If you screw it up you can always strain it or hit it with an immersion blender to break remove or break up the lumps.

Oh, and make sure you cook it out until the raw taste goes away.

[Connor]

By definition, does roux have to be made with clarified butter? I've never seen this distinction made before.

[ruhlman]

no, connor, it doesn't. though classically that's what the books call for, i would never use good, labored-over clarified butter for roux. always whole butter. and i don't know why bob would use it given time and cost factors, though i'm sure he has a good reason. the water cooks out anyway and the milk solids i can only imagine add to the flavor of the roux.

[Bob delGrosso]

Connor/Ruhlman

I like to make pale roux with pure fat -like clarified butter- to make sure the roux is strong and to minimize the amount I have to add.

If you use whole butter or anything with water in it, the amylase in the flour will tear up the starch in the very early stages of cooking of the roux. Therefore you have to use more of it to get the same effect. There's also the danger that if you don't know that the starch is chewed up your sauce or whatever will fall apart.

(I suppose you could cook out the butter a bit to get rid of the water before you add the flour. Not sure why I did not think of that before...)

BTW, this opinion is not based on anecdotal evidence but on repeated tests that I ran at CIA. We're talking many batches of roux made with pure and impure fats dispersed into equal volumes of stock which were then evaluated for viscosity. In any case, I'm pretty sure of what I talking about here.

Anyway, I always use clarified butter (I do not throw away the solids but use them for cooking other stuff).

For brown and black roux it doesn't much matter what you use as the long cooking of these break the starch up anyway.

[ruhlman]

so bob, for the home cook who doesn't want to clarify butter for a roux, would you recommend veg oil over whole butter?

[ruhlman]

bob, mcgee (p. 100) says that amalyse takes hours to break down starch. and that bringing it to boiling temp neutralizes it. a roux made with whole butter comes quickly to boiling temp and beyond, so how could the amalyse affect it?

[Joe]

I have a feeling that a flour-thickened sauce that breaks "because" of amylase (assuming that's what actually happens) would be so close to the edge of breaking that it would probably break anyway. Amylases and other enzymes function best in specific pH ranges and temperatures, and are definitely deactivated by heat.

FWIW, my home experience is that roux-thickened sauces are more stable than cornstarch-thickened ones. I rarely use beurre manié, as it seems like more of a PITA than cornstarch or a roux.

[KViz]

Wow...this is a fascinating discussion! I just love this! Thanks Chef Bob - I am going to try the log of pre-cooked roux. I already suspect it will add much more flavor.

Mr Ruhlman, your blog rocks. I am a devoted fan and recommend your books to everyone I can think of...thank you!

[Bob delGrosso]

Ruhlman
I'm not sure how to respond. There is always the chance that the decrease in thickening power and stability that I have observed with roux made with whole butter is a function of something other than amylase. Since one cannot observe the amylase doing anything it's not possible to know for sure what is going on.

I suppose I should retest this.

Also, I'm not sure that the discussion of egg yolk amylase on p. 100 of McGee applies here.

[Bob delGrosso]

Michael

Making roux with oil works just fine. It doesn't taste as good, and it doesn't harden up nicely like butter-fat does but there's not reason why it won't work.
Have you ever made roux with lard? Now that tastes good.

Back to the amylase issue. I'm very sceptical about my earlier hypothesis now. I still convinced it plays a role in the degradation of starch in something thickened with beurre manie, but not so sure the same is true in roux. All I am sure of is that if you make roux with whole butter it does not thickened as well.
There is an alternative explanation for this that does not involve amylase.

The water in the butter causes some of the starch in the roux to gel and clump. Because it is clumped it does not disperse as well when you add it to the liquid. Poor starch dispersal means poor thickening. You'll need to add more to get it to the same viscosity as the same amount of liquid that has been thickened with roux made from pure fat/oil.

Thanks for rattling the cage.

[S. Woody]

Great photo, Donna! A still life of simplicity!

[Dervin]

I just want to say this blog post saved Christmas Dinner for my family.

The Book and the Blog go perfectly together, I don't think I can write the appropriate hosannas to express my appreciation for both.

A newlywed friend of mine has a large stock pot which I'm going to kidnap for a weekend and make veal stock.

[Jen]

What can be used in place of flour for making roux? A close family friend is allergic to wheat and corn. So, no flour and no cornstarch. Am I stuck using arrowroot forever?