About Pasta “Roux”

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By Marcella Hazan

Published 1997

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This applies mainly to factory-made semolina pasta. Home cooks have long known that the water in which the pasta cooked contained some dissolved starch, and they used a spoonful of this water as a thickener, adding it to the sauce, to which they gave a very fast blast of heat and a swirl or two before tossing it with the pasta. Restaurant cooks have gone further. They drain the pasta when it is quite underdone, add the pasta and some of its water to a skillet containing the sauce, and toss it over high heat for a minute or so. It is to my mind a little like using roux, that flour-and-butter fixture of French sauces. I have never cared for roux-thickened sauces and I don’t like the fashion for pasta “roux,” as I call it. Today, in restaurant after restaurant, it imparts the same tedious, faintly gelatinous texture to what might otherwise have been fresh and lively sauces. When used occasionally and sagaciously—see the Broccoli and Mozzarella Pasta Sauce—it is to impart a special consistency to that dish. When the practice becomes routine, it ends by being boring.