Okay, so we've got our turkey sitting over here and roasting off, and look, look, look,
look... ooh, he's pretty.
Okay.
So it's time to do gravy, and when it comes down to serving a turkey, if you're going
to do gravy, this is exactly how you want to do it.
Pop him over there and leave him alone while you make the gravy.
Now, I realize I could have just jumped in and shown you how to do it, but I don't do
things exactly like most people do, and I want to tell you why.
A lot of people will tell you to take the roasting pan, and this is all the veggies
and the "smoodge" and the stuff that came out of the turkey, and they'll tell you to
put this on the stove and drain off the oil and add the flour.
I don't like to do that.
Couple of reasons.
Now, yes, all kinds of wonderful stuff sticks to the baking pan, but 99 percent of it will
come off if you use a rubber spatula, Okay?
So this is awkward and hard to deal with.
I would much rather do it this way.
Take everything that was in your baking sheet.
Put it into a strainer over a bowl, squish it, and then this is what you have.
Okay?
Can you see this?
Can you come?
Now, if you notice, you'll see there are two layers.
You see the lovely brown beautiful stuff on the bottom?
That's fabulous, we want that.
The top layer?
Is grease.
We don't want that.
So what I do is, I scrape everything off of here, through a strainer, smash it into here.
Give it a minute or two, it'll separate.
So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to take a minute, I'm going to just use a
spoon and pull off all that grease, and then I'll come back and I'll show you how to actually
begin the gravy in a pan that you can manage to work with.
So, give me just a second.
Okay, I realized when I said I was going to skim off the fat, you may not know what I
was talking about.
All right, this is it, this is all you do.
Take a little spoon, and I've gotten most of it so it's going to be a little hard, but
you come in here, and you can see the clear stuff, that's the fat.
See?
It's hard to get.
The brown stuff is the good stuff, that's the juices out of the turkey.
There's a little bit of the clear stuff back there, so we're just skimming that off.
Okay?
That's it.
Now, this is pure, seasoned turkey fat.
Believe it or not, we want to hang onto this.
I'll be back in a couple more videos.
I'm working on the schmaltz thing, so be patient, we're going to use that.
All right, so, to make gravy, we've got all of our pan drippings right here, we have four
cups of homemade turkey stock right here, we have half a cup of flour.
Now, when you're making gravy, you can do all kinds of things to it.
At this point, if you want to, you can add shallots or garlic or minced onion.
You can put any sort of herb or seasoning that you want to in here, and you simply saute
it for a minute before you proceed to the next step.
Well, what I want to do here is show you how to make just the basic, fabulous, luscious
turkey gravy, so that's all we're doing at this point.
All right, so I've got four tablespoons of butter.
Now, the reason I have four tablespoons is because I'm making a roux.
The general rule for a roux is one tablespoon of fat, be it turkey or butter or bacon or
chicken grease, whatever.
One tablespoon of fat and one tablespoon of flour will thicken one cup of liquid.
Since we have about five cups of liquid, and I like a thicker gravy, I add half a cup of
flour.
All right, are you with me?
Does that make sense?
Are we good?
But you can go one, one, one, that will make a really nice, kind of thick, not too heavy
gravy.
I like it heavier.
All right, so all I've done is melt my butter, and I'm sprinkling in the flour.
And you notice, I'm not going to stop whisking.
This is also why I don't like to use the baking sheet.
See how the whisk will fit all the way to the corners of my pan here?
This is not a true saucier, which is the correct French term for a pan that's designed to make
sauces, but it works.
It's a skillet.
So all we're doing here is getting our flour in.
We're going to go slowly.
Oh, hello [inaudible 0:04:21.]
That's [inaudible 0:04:22], that's my puppy.
He's talking to the cat.
We're going to slowly whisk this in.
Now, if you're making gumbos, or if you're going to make many sauces at all, you're going
to have to learn this particular step.
This is the first thing you do when making just about any of the classic French sauces:
making a roux.
Now down in Louisiana, they've done something brilliant and fabulous and they've developed
stages of the roux.
I don't think I've got a video on that yet, but I do have an article on my website that's
about blonde roux and brick roux and chocolate roux and all of the wonderful things that
can happen later, because it's amazing flavor.
All right, so that's about good.
You can see how my butter really doesn't want to take up any more of the flour...
We may be able to get a touch more in there, let's see.
Yeah, I can get it all in here.
So that was just a scant half-cup of flour, and you can see it's starting to bubble.
what happens here is that all of the little particles of flour become coated in the butter,
and they start to cook, which will keep it from having that raw flour taste, and it also
gets it ready for the next step, which is our drippings.
Now, the [inaudible 0:05:48] briner turkey, this is a very highly flavored little stock
that I have here.
It's pretty intense, and if you taste it just by itself, it's a little too salty.
But that's okay, because in our stock over here, we don't have many seasonings at all,
so the two of them together are going to come and make this happy medium... median... medium?
Medium.
So this is the trick to gravy.
You whisk, and you don't stop, and you kind of work slow, and at each point when you're
adding a liquid, you make sure that you have fully incorporated all of the liquid before
you put too much more in there.
Now you can see how I was talking, I like thicker gravy.
Good grief, this stuff right now, you could stick on bread, it'd be delicious.
But we don't want this quite this thick, it's a little too much to use on potatoes or a
dressing or whatever, but you can see how it's nice and smooth, I don't have lumps.
That's what we're looking for.
So now I'm going to just do the same thing, except this is my turkey broth.
This is the boring part, not a whole lot happening.
But at this point, all you do is continue whisking, continue adding liquid little bit
at a time, allowing that flour and butter to remain at temperature, because that takes
care of the consistency, it keeps you from having lumps in your gravy, although if you
do get lumps, you know, it's not the end of the world.
Strain it, run it through a strainer, nobody will know the difference.
I've done that once or twice in my time.
So this is it, this is all you do.
So while your turkey's over here resting, you pop over to the stove and make gravy.
Now, I am going to continue whisking in the last of this.
I'm going to whisk in however much of the last two cups I think I might need to get
the right consistency, and I'll be back in a minute to show you the finished product.
Okay, we're moving?
All righty.
So all I did was I continued to add some of the turkey broth, so we started out with,
say, a cup to a cup and a half of the drippings from the turkey.
We had one two-cup measure of turkey stock, and then about another cup.
Now, I think that this is just about right.
Let me show you what's going to happen.
It's going to come to a boil, and you don't want to let it come... not a full rolling
boil, but you want to let it come up to a simmer.
The reason is, no thickening agent is going to come to its full thickening power until
it has cooked up for at least a minute.
So we want to...
Oh, here we go, this is exactly what we want.
See these little bubblies, see that?
Okay.
That's perfect.
You can also see how it's starting to get nice and thick.
Now, remember, once we remove this from the heat, it will continue to thicken a little
bit, so you actually want it just a touch thinner when you take it off the heat than
you want it to end up at the table, so keep that in mind.
However, all we did was whisk, and that's the trick, making sure that your flour goes
in as fully incorporated and that you whisk when you're adding your liquids, and you will
never see a silkier gravy than that right there.
Now, as always with everything, because we had those really salty turkey drippings from...
that came out, and we had the rather unseasoned turkey stock, we want to make sure we came
to the right balance, so never serve anything without tasting.
All that needs...
no salt.
All that needs is a little pepper.
Okay, that's it, it's perfect.
So we're going to remove it from the heat, and at this point...
[inaudible 0:10:04] and the cat, sorry.
At this point, we're going to pop him in a gravy boat.
It'll thicken up just a touch more...
I'm going to run over here and carve our turkey in a second, and we almost ready.
Oh gosh, [so let] our turkey have a bath in this stuff.
And deal with my dog.
I'll be back in a minute.