As frost settles onto the lawns and the furnace purrs to life, the warm holiday-time meats, hearty stews, and creamy carbs are the only food groups I look forward to eating. And what makes these dishes even better is the gravy which, let’s be honest, is the secret sauce and the glue that keeps me sane during the bitterly miserable cold. Whether we’re looking for a holiday hack or we want to turn up a weeknight dish to an eleven, there’s a secret to having deep and complex-tasting gravy without the hassle of roasting a hunk of meat for hours to get those rich and delicious pan drippings. A gravy that tastes like you’ve been toiling over a hot stove, minus the toiling part? Count me in!
To start, you use a carton or two of grocery-store stock (turkey or chicken stock for a poultry or pork dish and beef for a beef or red meat dish). Make sure you use a big enough pot, you’ll be adding more ingredients!
If you’re prepping for Thanksgiving, place the turkey neck into the stock. No neck? No problem, instead you can use other enriching meat parts like a chicken thigh, a beef rib, or a pork chop bone. Not a meat eater? Don’t stress! For a vegetarian option, use vegetable stock and enrich it with dried or fresh mushrooms.
Then add fragrant ingredients, all of which don’t need much prep work. Dump in roughly chopped celery, carrots, and onions. After this, bring the stock to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer. At this point, you can add other spices like whole peppercorns or bay leaves.
A word for the wise, not all herbs have the same fragrance, some are way more overpowering than others! When adding woody herbs like sage and rosemary, be sparing, as they can easily overwhelm the palate and make your stock taste like pine needles. You can simply add parsley — leaf, stems, and all — into the stock, as you’ll be removing it later.
Depending on the enriching meat you used, you’ll want to simmer the stock until the meat (like the turkey neck) is cooked completely. This can take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour.
After it cooks, strain the stock to remove the seasonings. If you want, you can salt the stock, but you’ll be salting the gravy, so you can skip this step for now. With the still-warm stock, you can easily whip up a make-ahead gravy.
For an added boost of flavor, add a splash of alcohol (it really depends on what you have on hand), white wine or whiskey will do wonders to the gravy. The alcohol itself will cook off, but the complexity will linger. Once cooled, you can store it until the day of the holiday or any night that requires an extra level of comfort. When reheating the gravy, you can always add a splash or two of stock or water to break it up and smooth it out.