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Buerre Manié: How Should It Work?


Smithy

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I recently tried a recipe that included a sauce with buerre manié: butter mixed with flour to form a soft paste that is then added to the sauce as a thickener. It sounded good, but that night's result was a gloppy, floury, not-at-all tasty mess.  (You can read more about it here.)  I know flour can be used as a thickener - gravy is a classic example - but I'm not sure how  buerre manié is supposed to work. 

 

The recipe says to mash 4 tbsp butter until soft, then work in 3 tbsp all-purpose flour until the mixture is a smooth paste - the buerre manié. This paste is then added to the rest of the sauce, and the quantity of the sauce is a bit vague in this particular recipe.  It doesn't sound as though much cooking should happen afterward. My questions:

 

  • What proportion of buerre manié should be used to thicken a sauce?

     

  • Should the sauce be cooked after the butter paste is added in order to cook the flour?  

     

  • Should the flour be cooked slightly before it's mixed into the butter?

     

  • Am I missing other fine points of this butter-and-flour technique?

     

     

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Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
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"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

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Smithy,

 

I tried the buerre manie technique for thickening a sauce years ago, and at this point, I can't recall the recipe or the source. Many respected sources recommend it, but like you, I found it lacking and never tried it again. There are probably folks on here who use buerre manie regularly and can tell you how to use it successfully, but I can tell you how to adapt a sauce that calls for it in a way that works better, at least for me. I really disliked the raw flour taste.

 

I like the method where you melt the butter, soften your onion/shallot if using until most of the water is gone, then add flour and stir around until it's smooth and bubbly. Let it go a bit at this point until you get the brown you want on the butter and flour. I like it pretty pretty toasty because it brings the browned butter and nutty flour flavor to the sauce, but if you're shooting for a very white sauce, you cook it less. Then I take it off the heat and add the cold liquid. I've made it with just milk, just stock, and a combination of both, but I see no reason it wouldn't work with just wine. Then you stir constantly (I use medium high heat) until the mixture thickens and boils. Reduce heat and continue to simmer and stir for about a minute. I've never had lumps, but I do stir pretty constantly. If you have to leave it, you can get away with a few seconds, and it helps to set it off heat, but do not walk away.

 

This is one of the places where I measure everything carefully. The standard proportions are for 1 cup liquid and the equal portions for flour and butter are: thin (cream soups) 1 T, medium 2 T, thick (souffles) 3 T.

 

I've also used a slurry of cornstarch and cold water, or cornstarch and soy sauce, wine, and/or vinegar into a simmering sauce for thickening, and that works well.

 

The cooking all in one pan also eliminates extra dishes to clean from working the flour into the butter.

 

I've just never seen a reason to pursue buerre manie, but I'll look forward to learning more about it. Maybe I'm missing something.

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> ^ . . ^ <

 

 

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buerre manié serves two purposes:

  1. to thicken an integral sauce--one made with resulting natural cooking juices, as with a braise--at the end of cooking, when you can't make a separate sauce such as a bechamel or velouté that starts with a cooked roux.  The latter is what TFTCrepes describes.
  2. mixing the flour with the butter prevents it from lumping when added to the hot liquid.

 

The ratio I learned was 1 Tbsp each butter and flour to 1 cup liquid. It needs to be brought to a simmer before you see any thickening so add it slowly so you don't overdo it.  Somewhere along the way I learned that when using a buerre manié, either stop cooking the sauce once it thickens or that it needs a long, slow cooking afterwards (such as with a coq au vin).  

 

Out of curiousity, I consulted James Peterson's great book Sauces and here's what he says about buerre manié:

Unlike roux, buerre manié should not be cooked any longer once the mixture thickens, or the sauce will develop a strong floury taste.  One of the peculiarities of flour is that it develops a strong floury taste after two minutes of cooking that begins to disappear as the cooking progresses, usually after thirty minutes.

 

edited for typos

Edited by LindaK (log)
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Thank you for those very useful insights. I didn't know that flour cooked in butter would develop that strong floury taste and that the taste would go away after long cooking. That's almost certainly one of the places I went wrong. (It sounds like there was also too much buerre manié used for the amount of stock I had.)

If I'm reading the Beard excerpt correctly, the same issues would apply to a flour/water slurry used to thicken gravies, as I used to do when I cooked turkey. It sounds like I lucked out with the timing, the proportions, or both! Is that true?

I'll give it another try, but not on that recipe, not for a while.

Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
HosteG Forumsnsmith@egstaff.org

Follow us on social media! Facebook; instagram.com/egulletx; twitter.com/egullet

"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

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Nancy, I don’t have a knowledgeable answer to your gravy question, but I’ll give it some thought and maybe do some reading..

 

Back to your oyster recipe—when I looked at your link and saw that the recipe in question was for Oysters à la Marinière, I was puzzled as I’d never heard of using a flour thickener in a marinière before. And come to think of it, I’d never heard of oysters marinière.  A quick search not only turned up the recipe, but a video of the chef at Commander’s Palace making the recipe! (from the excellent old TV series Great Chefs)

 

http://greatchefs.com/recipes/oysters-mariniere/

 

Two quick takeaways: very low flour to butter ratio, and specific instructions to cook the sauce only 30 seconds after adding the buerre manié.

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LindaK, thank you very much for that link! The instructions as printed are clearer than those in my cookbook, but the video really brought the process home to me. I'm a little puzzled by your takeaway of "very low flour to butter ratio". Theirs is 3T flour to 1/4c butter, which (I believe) works out to 3T:4T. That's 75% of your 1T:1T ratio. Is the flour:fat ratio so sensitive?

With regard to the gravy slurry question, I'm thinking about a flour/water slurry and its effects on thickening and smoothing a sauce as compared to a flour/butter paste. I suspect the fats of the butter would help bring out flavors that the water might not. It would be worth testing, but if you can shed light on the two I'd love to learn more.

Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
HosteG Forumsnsmith@egstaff.org

Follow us on social media! Facebook; instagram.com/egulletx; twitter.com/egullet

"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

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Hello , 

 

It's  been a long time I didn't hear  about this name...

 

When I started 30 years ago, the Beurre manié was very common in all the kitchens and was used to finalize  preparations and sauces  thickening.

Now , we use cornstarch or arrow root but those products were not  popular  and easy to find 25 five years ago ( in France , for my concern) .

 

Some elder chefs even used the dripping fat from roast ( instead f the butter) to make the Beurre Manié !! 

 

In the places  i saw this stuff ,  it used to  be done with 1/3 of  Torrefied flour( to avoid too as much as possible the slurry consistance) and 2/3 of soft butter.

 

Your sauce had to boil for a while to thicken a bit and only a small amount could be  used otherwise your sauce was spoilt  and too  heavy...

 

Finally , it was just ok...... in case of emergency......

 

 

 

 

Executive chef & cooking teacher:   http://so-easycooking.blogspot.com/

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I take the easy way - I make&freeze a 1:1 roux.

 

wrapped in aluminum foil to avoid unwanted flavors.

I stock a log roll of blonde and a log roll of dark.

lop off a chunk & toss it in the pot.  no thick enough, lop off another bit.....

 

keeping in mind the theory that the fat coats the flour particles so they swell&thicken without becoming glue, seems one would need to do a lot of fork mixing raw flour&butter.

Edited by AlaMoi (log)
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I like buerre manie for certain things.  It gives a really great mouthfeel to sauces  over the slightly more sticky or gelatinous texture from other starches.    The technique of coating the flour with the butter can be used with other starches btw, I have done it with ultrasperse  and it worked great for adding easily  to a hot liquid , avoiding clumps  or lumps. . 

Edited by Ashen (log)

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  • 2 weeks later...

To avoid the raw flour taste,  I bake dry flour in my toaster oven for 30-45 minutes at about 375F before adding it to the butter.  I do this as well for flour that I'm going to add to make a pan sauce. My family likes large quantities of gravy on holidays. So,  for example, for Thanksgiving I will cook a separate Turkey ahead of time in order to make broth.   I toast the flour ahead of time as well. Then on the day of the meal, I mix the broth with the toasted flour, season and simmer until the desired consistency is obtained. 

Edited by kbjesq
Fix typo (log)
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