A recipe for real gravy.

The recipe and methods that you need to make real gravy.

The thing is in this world we are fast losing certain things and one of them is how to make good gravy. We have for our conveyance a range of powder gravies that you just add hot water to and hay presto on sweat not worry you have perfectly good gravy. You can get every kind of flavour that you want and just boil the kettle and away you go. All of these products are alright but if you are taking the time to do a roast dinner and have the family round to sit down and talk and find out what every one has been doing over the past week them make real gravy.
I do know that it is very unfashionable now to say make gravy as it involves using fat and flour that is frond on. Any one eating fat is mad or bad and to use flour to thicken any thing s looked on as old fashioned. But it is that very base that will give you the grate tasting gravy. But if you take five second to read what goes into the powder gravy you would find much the same amount of things going in to them.
Now to make good gravy you will need to take a piece of meat and roast it. With out roasting you will not get the long cook out flavours of a sauce. Any piece of meat or bird will give you the juices that you get from roasting. Just make sure that you collect them and save them to make the gravy. Most of the time they are just discarded and washed down the plug hole with the washing up water. In the little burnt on bits of brown crystallized juices is flavour packed and not to be wasted.
To start with see how much fat has come out of what you are cooking. If you have enough to cover the base of the sauce pan then drain some of and add a little flour. Now you want approximately half fat to flour for this to work properly. What you are looking for is to make a roux. But you want to cook the flour so that it starts to darken and turns a darker drown. This does take time and you can just make the roux add some water or stock and then use a gravy drowning it you like but this is better trust me. Another way to get the colure into the gravy faster then letting the flour cook is to get some onions into the fat and let them caramelize and take on the colure.
Now this does take a little time but in the end when you taste the final product you will never wish to go back.
Now if you have it use some stock from the meat that you are cooking. As most of us don not the next best thing is to take the roasting trays and place that on a gas ring and pour boiling water into that. This will release all the flavours of the roasting dish into the water. I always remember my mum used to use the water from the green vegetables to make her gravy. If it was not used for this it was a strange drink called green water. Just the water from the cabbage with a little pepper and the salt from the cooking water. Sound unpleasant but actually was not that bad. What ever you use try and make sure that it is hot and not cold or you will slow the whole process down.
Add what ever you are going to use to the darken roux a little at a time till you have the right consistency of gravy that you are looking for .Taste it to see if you think it need seasoning or not and then strain it if you want to.
What ever you do you can not walk away from it or it will start to burn and that would not help. All you get then is a biter note to the back taste and not a nutty flavour. So take the time and make your own gravy. At the end of it all you will have some thing that is well worth it.