- It'd be the perfect autumnal thing to wipe a tear with.
- [Chelsea] Um, were you just seasoning yourself"
*Shock* (beep)
What's up everyone?
It's Justin from the Delish test kitchen
and picture this:
it's the end of Thanksgiving cooking.
You just did your turkey,
your collard greens,
your mashed potato, stuffing,
everything's out of the oven and finished,
and you think you're finally ready to sit down,
but you're not.
You're not ready to sit down,
because you have the one final thing you have to make
and arguably, maybe the most important thing,
and that is gravy.
Gravy is the almighty uniter,
can take things like sweet potato casserole,
cranberry sauce,
and like, bacon-laced string beans,
and put them all together
and make them taste harmonious.
It's golden liquid deliciousness,
and we're gonna show you how to make
the perfect version today.
Here's a little secret is that gravy
is literally just thickened stock or thickened drippings.
That's why you can get like, mushroom gravy,
beef gravy, chicken gravy.
It's just like those things in a stock or liquid form
and then thickened up.
It's really simple,
but it can be surprisingly, deceptively tricky.
So, we're gonna do our best to make sure that you are not
screwing up the final step in your holiday dinner.
Before we get started with anything,
I'm just gonna chop up a couple herbs.
The holidays are kind of built on the backbones
of rosemary, thyme, and sage.
This gravy has thyme and sage,
but you can use any like, bright, fresh green herb
that you might find on your holiday table.
I just, I love how sage feels.
It's so, it's like a peach skin but nicer
and it smells really good.
I kind of, I like the idea of using it like
if I had to wipe a tear,
it'd be the perfect autumnal thing to wipe a tear with.
- [Chelsea] Um, were you just seasoning yourself?
- That's, honestly, that's true.
- [Chelsea] Yeah. - I like to be seasoned.
Well seasoned and well maintained.
These, ladies and germs, are turkey pan drippings.
We were testing some turkey roasting methods
next door yesterday.
I told them to reserve as much as they could
and this is what was left.
We deglazed a little bit off the pan,
we have about a cup here.
The recipe calls for a cup.
The majority of the liquid is gonna come from the drippings,
but, we're gonna supplement with also
a bit of store bought chicken stock.
You can use turkey stock if you've already made it,
just make sure it's not like super salty.
If you're buying store bought,
make sure it's that like, reduced sodium
'cause we wanna be able to season it ourselves.
If you don't have a full cup of drippings,
you can just use a little bit more stock.
If you have a little bit more drippings,
just use a little less stock.
Easy.
- [Crew] Okay, Justin? - Yes?
- [Crew] Carly, from YouTube, has a question for you.
"How do I make gravy without pan drippings?"
- That is a great question.
There's a bunch of ways to do it.
First of all, you can just use all stock.
Then I would probably supplement with other flavorings
or maybe some, like, boil some aromatics in it
so it just gets a little bit more oomph of flavor
that you wouldn't get from plain store bought stock.
Or what you can do is you can take the giblets
and you can spatchcock the turkey,
take out the spine,
cook that off in a pan with some garlic, some onions,
then deglaze with a little bit of wine or stock,
and basically make a super quick turkey stock
from all of those like, leftover things
that you're not even cooking in the turkey.
As I said before, gravy is just basically like,
thickened juices in stock,
and it usually requires a thickening agent.
In this case we're gonna be using roux.
It's the most traditional,
it's also French,
technique to make something thicker.
It's a combination of flour and butter cooked off together
until it creates this like nutty, delicious,
toasty-smelling paste that you then whisk in stock
or drippings or jus to make into a sauce.
There are different gradations of a roux,
all the way from like, blonde to brick red.
That's what, you know, like gumbo is really made
with that beautiful, deep, dark, rich caramelly colors.
This is gonna be with something like,
more like a blonde golden roux.
We're only gonna cook it for a few minutes,
just to get that like, raw flour flavor out of there
so we can thicken our stock.
I've got our saucepan over medium heat.
I'm gonna go immediately in with our butter.
We're gonna melt it until it's nice and foamy.
Then we're gonna sprinkle in our flour
and immediately start whisking.
The tricky thing about a roux is it can burn kind of easily,
especially if you go on higher heats.
So making sure that we have that constant motion
so that the flour isn't sticking in one place for too long,
we'll ensure it doesn't burn.
Also, butter and flour are relatively cheap
so if you do burn it, you can just start again.
You haven't added on any other ingredients,
so it's a really easy point to kind of just start over.
You can already see this went from like pale blonde
to like, this golden color.
That's exactly what we're looking for.
That adds an extra layer of flavor
that you wouldn't have even gotten
if you didn't take it that long.
Once the roux is cooked off,
and you don't have that raw floury smell,
you're gonna add in your drippings.
Whisk really nicely.
We don't want any clumps or lumps in there,
so adding gradually will be helpful.
Once it's all combined,
you're gonna bring it to a boil
then immediately reduced to a simmer.
This is when we're allowing the roux to activate
to actually thicken our drippings.
So you can see that this is kind of pasty.
It's actually kind of perfect 'cause now,
we're gonna be able to add in as much stock as we want
to get the desired consistency.
After you've cooked that off
for about like, two to three minutes,
we're gonna add in an additional cup of stock.
This is about when we're gonna figure out
how thin we want our gravy.
You can add a little bit of more stock,
a little less depending on what consistency
you're looking for.
Then we're gonna finish it off with our herbs.
That's just gonna add the finishing notes of flavor
that really take it to the next level.
And then finally, make sure you season
with a good amount of salt and especially black pepper.
I love black pepper in my gravy.
Then you're just gonna let this go for another 10 minutes.
That's just gonna allow all those flavors to come together
and we'll show you your final consistency of your gravy,
and if it's still thick at that point,
you can add a little bit more broth.
The key to ensuring there are absolutely no lumps
in your gravy is to gradually add your liquid.
That will mean that there will be no like,
clumping up as you're adding like a big plop of liquid
and whisking as you do so will make for
perfectly smooth, delicious, beautiful gravy.
- [Crew] I have a question.
- What's up?
- [Crew] Okay, Erica wants to know,
"Can you make a gluten-free gravy that isn't runny?
- Ooh, yes, you can.
So you could just technically reduce
the liquid without like, a roux
or any thickening agent and it will eventually get thick,
but you might still consider that runny.
My favorite way to thicken stock
if I'm not using flour is to actually use corn starch
or some other form of starch
like potato starch and make a slurry.
That technique is really commonly used
in like, Chinese cooking to thicken up sauces
and stir fries.
So just adding like a corn starch and water slurry
to a liquid like this will actually help to thicken up
really, really nicely.
This is basically ready to go.
I like my gravy to have a consistency
not like a KFC gravy
or like, what you get out of a jar,
I want there to be some runniness
and a little less body to it,
but it's just up to preference.
You can thin it out or thick it out
depending on how much stock you use.
- [Crew] Justin? - Yeah?
- [Crew] I have a question.
- Hit it. Sock it to me!
- [Crew] So this is from AsakuraClan.
- Sweet.
- [Crew] "How do I make a vegetarian gravy?"
- That's a great question.
A lot of people wanna make a vegetarian gravy,
especially if you're having like a vegan,
vegetarian Thanksgiving.
It's really simple.
I would take some like,
instead of using like a cup of drippings
and a cup of stock,
I would actually just buy some like, veggie stock,
store bought veggie stock,
you can find some really great ones nowadays.
I would add a bunch of aromatics,
like you could even like, roast them off beforehand.
But if you wanna be lazy,
you could add some like, celery
and some carrot, onions, garlic,
and different things that make stock delicious
and just amp it up a ton,
boil that off so we just drain all of the flavors from that,
strain it and use that as the base of our gravy.
If you wanna make it totally vegan,
you could use margarine instead of butter,
or you could use that corn starch thickening method
that I mentioned before.
And like, we're basically done.
We simmered it for the last bunch of minutes.
Those flavors have developed.
It's kind of crazy,
like I know it can kind of be a bother
after your turkey's done to have to make this afterwards,
but, your turkey's got to rest
and you could probably pull this together
in that same amount of time.
- [Crew] Final question! - Amazing.
- [Crew] Susan would like, Oh, oh, are we? Okay.
Final question. - What happened?
- [Crew] Justin, I'm talking! - I'm sorry.
- [Crew] Susan would like to know,
is it acceptable for her to classify gravy as a beverage?
- This is the best question I've ever heard.
The answer is unequivocally correct and I'll prove it.
Slainte.
Oh man.
It is sinful.
I don't know if I'd do this every day of my life,
but that was really yum.
I wanna do it like, with a pickle back shot,
like one to one,
like just, (crew groaning)
really clog my arteries.
This is really good.
It's the perfect consistency.
It's like thick but not too thick,
but not super runny.
You get those turkey drippings,
like all that umami,
all that fond that formed at the bottom
of the roasting pan will come up
and add a ton of flavor to your gravy.
And then just that like hit of the sage
and the thyme really remind you like,
"Hey, it's the holidays baby."
You got that like woodsy sage flavor,
and that like, little light herbaceous thyme note.
As any good gravy should be,
it's decadent, it's rich,
it has like a butteriness,
not just from the butter that was used in it,
but also from like, the stock and all of it itself.
That's almost like, the extra super luxurious
nature of this gravy.
Obviously, my favorite thing to put this over
is mashed potatoes and turkey,
but this would work anywhere.
It would work in a sandwich.
It works over like, rice the next day.
It works with like, you could put it on a burger,
on a sandwich with a little bit of veg.
There's nothing that this doesn't go good on,
I'm telling you.
It's why gravy is like, up there
with ketchup and mayo as like, the perfect condiment.
All right, we're done with the video, see you later.
Chelsea, bye.
But wait!
There's more.
It's leftover land.
♪ Buh buh buh buh buh buh ♪
♪ We gonna go to Six Flags ♪
♪ And that's where we eat gravy. ♪
♪ I don't know what my baby. ♪
Okay, sorry. (beep)
Something you might not know about me
is I'm very French Canadian.
Apparently my like, grandma thinks that we came over here
with like, Lafayette before the Revolutionary War.
I don't even know.
Regardless, I love French Canadian culture,
food, and especially poutine,
and it is my absolute favorite thing to put gravy on
other than like, turkey, I guess.
I know you're probably already just overcoming
your turkey coma the next day, but I don't know,
I think that a batch of poutine will make anyone smile.
We're gonna slice up some russet potatoes.
I like to keep my skin on,
that's pretty rustic,
and that reminds me a lot of the poutine I've had in Quebec.
Then you're gonna give 'em a fry.
You could even use like, frozen french fries.
But I think taking the time to do your own frying,
like maybe even like, a double fry
if you wanna make them extra crispy,
really pays off in the end.
Then we're gonna top our fries with some cheese curds.
You can find these in like a lot of grocery stores.
You can even order them online.
They're just like, they're sort of like, proto cheese.
They're what cheese comes from.
They kinda just taste like mozzarella.
They're squeaky, delicious, salty, great on fries.
Then we're gonna pour over our hot gravy,
that's gonna help our cheese curds to melt a little bit,
and that's literally it.
I'm gonna eat this.
I'm gonna eat all of this.
I think a bunch of people have talked
about the phenomenon of like, crispy gone soggy.
This is the epitome of that sensation.
You still have the ends that are still exposed
and not submerged in gravy.
Those retain the crispiness,
but then all the stuff that has the gravy
gets like, a little soggy,
gets like, fully soaked through
with those delicious flavors.
And then the squeaky cheese curds add like,
little bright, sharp, salty note.
People throw around the word sinful for foods often.
This is sinful in the best way.
And you know what,
I think the reason why I love this so much
is 'cause not only am I French Canadian,
but I'm also from New Jersey,
and there's this thing called disco fries,
which is gravy and mozzarella,
which is basically the same thing.
And so I have like two identities that are very strong,
forcing me to be in love with a food like this.
And I'm in love.
If I could marry a food, it would be this one.
At the end of the day,
the thing that makes poutine so spectacular is that gravy,
and this gravy in particular is unbelievable.
So, for more incredible toppings,
condiments, sauces for your holiday table,
head on over to delish.com all season long.