How to Make a Vegetable Roux

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to take a few minutes and show you how to make pot roast. It's been about 15 minutes, so let's see how we're looking. Once again, open your lid away from yourself so you don't get a big, old steam burn in the face. Now, you'll see what's happened here is that piece of fat has curled up on itself -- not a bad thing. It will do that. So you just want to stir through, but you will see how everything's taken a nice transparent and brown appearance, which is fantastic. That's what we want. So now, what we're going to do is we're just going to, for a moment, we're going to pull this piece out. That's that piece of fat that we cut out, and also the other piece that fell in there. And now, we're going to add in the -- oopsie. We're going to add in the carrots and the celery. I'm just going to take those out. And just stir them in. We're not trying to cook them right now. We're just trying to get them nice and coated. Now, we're going to take all that seasoned flour from earlier. You're probably thinking to yourself, "What are you doing, man? That's kind of strange." What this is going to do, this is going to help thicken up the pot roast gravy. It's making a roux. We're taking the oil from the fat and from the actual oil, some of the olive oil that was in there, and we're combining it with this flour. And we can turn the heat up, too, while we're at it. And this is going to make a roux. And suddenly it dawns on you, "Wow. I don't have to make separate roux. I can make roux out of whatever cooking oil I'm using in the pan." The good thing is, is because this roux sticks to the vegetables, you have less issues with lumps because you're not just adding the flour right in to the mixture, as so many recipes would have you do. And this way, it also helps get it cooked and you also know that you've actually made a nice paste. You can tell because, as you kind of smash it up with your spatula like that, you can see if there's any spots that are still white, and which means that the flour hasn't been in contact with the oils. As we can see by looking at this, we have a nice, beautiful, lovely aromatic roux vegetable combination. So what we're going to do is we're going to salt this. Not too much, though, because there's already quite a bit of salt in that flour. And there's also going to be quite a bit of salt in the beef paste we're going to put in here in just a second. So we're going to let this cook for about a minute or so, and then we'll come back and finish it off. Let it cook uncovered, too, so that's important."