📦
Multipack
Kitchen Bouquet Browning & Seasoning Sauce, 4 oz, 2 Pack
$20.41
🚚 Free Shipping on All Orders✅ In Stock & Ready to Ship🔒 Secure Checkout
Product Details
Kitchen Bouquet has held a place in American pantries for well over a century, and it does one job very well: it puts color into food that has not had the time or the heat to brown on its own. A few drops turn pale pan gravy the deep mahogany people expect at a holiday table, and it does the same for slow-cooker pot roast, beef stew, and any sauce that tastes right but looks washed out.
It is concentrated, so cooks work by the drop or the half teaspoon, stirring it in near the end and adjusting by eye. Along with the color comes a low, savory, faintly molasses-like note that fills out a thin gravy. Many cooks also brush a little over poultry or a roast before it goes into the oven for a more even finish.
This is a cook's shortcut of the old school, and it earns its shelf space every time a stew comes out tasting finished but looking underdone.
Kitchen Bouquet Browning & Seasoning Sauce,...
$20.41
Questions About This Product
The things people actually want to know before they cook with it.
What can I use instead of Kitchen Bouquet?
Gravy Master is the closest single replacement and goes in at roughly the same rate. Failing that, dark soy sauce or a spoonful of molasses will darken a sauce, but both change how it tastes: soy brings a lot of salt, molasses brings sweetness. You can also make your own by caramelising a tablespoon of sugar in a dry pan until it is almost black and stirring in a little hot water. Nothing else on an ordinary shelf darkens food without also seasoning it noticeably.
What is the difference between Kitchen Bouquet and Gravy Master?
Kitchen Bouquet is caramel colour over a vegetable base of carrot, celery, cabbage, onion, parsley, turnip and parsnip, with almost no salt at 5 mg per teaspoon. Gravy Master is built on caramelised sugar and caramel colour with hydrolysed soy and corn protein, cider vinegar, salt, onion and garlic, so it tastes distinctly more savoury and slightly tangy. Both darken about equally. Reach for Kitchen Bouquet when you want colour and very little else, and for Gravy Master when you also want a bouillon-like note. Gravy Master contains soy, which matters if someone at the table avoids it.
Does Kitchen Bouquet add flavour or just colour?
Mostly colour. The savoury note is real but faint, because the spices, salt and vegetable seasoning together sit under 2 percent of the bottle and a whole teaspoon contributes only 5 mg of sodium. It will not rescue a gravy that tastes flat. It rescues a gravy that tastes right and looks pale.
How much Kitchen Bouquet should I use?
Start at about half a teaspoon per cup of liquid and adjust by eye. It is a concentrate, the colour develops the instant it is stirred in, and it cannot be taken back out, so add it near the end of cooking a few drops at a time rather than at the beginning. Overdone, it reads grey-black rather than brown and brings a faintly bitter edge from the caramel.
Is Kitchen Bouquet vegan?
Nothing on the ingredient list comes from an animal: caramel colour, water, a vegetable base of carrot, celery, cabbage, onion, parsley, turnip and parsnip, then spices, salt and sodium benzoate. The bottle carries no vegan certification, however, so anyone who needs a certification rather than an ingredient list should check with the manufacturer.
Can I use it instead of making a dark roux for gumbo?
It will get you the colour but not the dish. A dark roux does three jobs at once: it colours, it thickens, and browning the flour builds the toasted, nutty flavour that defines gumbo. Kitchen Bouquet only does the first. Cooks do use a few drops to deepen a roux that has not gone dark enough, which is a reasonable rescue, but it is not a way to skip the roux.
Can I use it in place of Worcestershire sauce?
No, they do different jobs. Worcestershire is a thin, sharp fermented sauce of vinegar, tamarind, anchovy and spices, and it seasons strongly. Kitchen Bouquet colours and barely seasons. Swap one for the other and you get either brown food with no lift or a well seasoned sauce that is still pale.
Is it the same thing as browning sauce or gravy browning?
Yes, that is the category. Browning sauces are all caramel colour concentrates, and the gravy brownings sold in Britain and the Caribbean do the same job with the same mechanism. What none of them are is gravy: they add no thickening at all, so the flour, cornstarch or roux still has to come from somewhere else.
Does Kitchen Bouquet go bad?
It is unusually stable. A concentrate of caramel and salt with sodium benzoate added as a preservative is a hostile place for anything to grow. Past the date on the bottle you may see it thicken slightly or throw a little sediment, both cosmetic. Discard it if it smells sour or fermented or if anything has visibly grown in the neck, which is rare.
What Shoppers Say
Honest reviews from people who actually bought it.