Posts Tagged ‘dinner’
The Art of Gravy Making
I’m a great believer in the benefits of roast dinner as a way to socialise and be merry. I have a pretty stiff opinion about most parts of the process of preparing the aforementioned roast dinner. Every part of the dinner is important – potatoes and pumpkin go together very nicely, onion adds a bit of as the french would say, “I don’t know what”, the meat is clearly the star attraction and the peas and broccoli add an important touch of colour to the plate. However I believe the final crowning achievement of any roaster is the gravy.
Now, before getting too crazy about this gravy business let me say this, it’s easy to screw up, and especially easy to screw up when you start adding your own stuff to it so let me step you through the basics and then we will work on spicing things up a little.
- First thing’s first. Roast the shit out of your favourite meat.
- Now when you are done and have carved it and it’s ready to serve get all that yummy meat juice from your cutting board and add it back into the roasty tray.
- Stick your roasting tray on the stove on a low-medium heat and sprinkle a good dose of flour lightly across the entire roasting pan. You don’t want to dump it all in one big blob, you want it to be more like snow all over the pan juices. Add to this a healthy amount of salt and crack some pepper as well. The salt is the key ingredient so don’t be too shy, but for god’s sake don’t overdo it.
- Grab a fork and using the back of it, stir all this flour into the juices. This should all turn pretty brown and very pasty.
- Add to this paste some water. The amount depends on a variety of things – how much paste you’ve got, how thick you want the gravy and the alignment of the constellation of Aries in the southern sky. You actually want this water to be the water you have poured off the peas and broccoli if possible, otherwise normal water is fine.
- Cook this concoction over a low heat while constantly stirring. This will end up as the gravy.
- Undoubtedly there won’t be the right amount or it will be the wrong consistency so you need to add more water/more flour or more of both (to make more) If you are going to add more flour you should premix it with a little bit of water in a cup before you add it to the mix. This stops it from turning lumpy and ruining your masterpiece.
So that’s all pretty easy, and to be fair the gravy that you will end up with should be pretty amazing. Amazing is good, but it isn’t going to keep you happy on 7 meals a week so it’s time to spice things up a little bit. There is a variety of things you can do to add your own take and as long as you don’t go too mad adding pretty much anything is going to give you some unique flavours. A few things I like to do are,
- Add a bit of chilli powder when you are first adding the flour and salt.
- Stir in some tomato paste before you add the water, barbecue sauce goes alright as well.
- I do this pretty much every time I make gravy – add a good splash of red wine with the water – you can probably add white wine as well but I’ve never tried.
- Use beef stock instead of water – You could do this if you don’t have much (is any) pan juices.