 Gravy is... Gravy is... Gravy is an American, as you can get, it is the quintessential sauce. It's a lemon tree. When you think of gravy, it feels warm and cozy. It's Sunday dinner, it's family, it's friends, it's comfort food. My name is Todd Coleman. I'm a creative content director at the Spruce Eats. I'm going to make a classic turkey gravy. Today I'm also going to show you two variations on gravy, an uber luscious mushroom vegetarian gravy, and my outrageous 24-hour gravy. Once you learn all three of these recipes, from the classic to the mushroom to the 24-hour, you're going to really understand what it means to make and serve the best gravy. This is the most classic or fundamental of gravies, the one you need to learn first before you can stray off the path. So the first step are my drippings. Heather, drippings are the magic leavings in the bottom of the pan that come for your turkey or chicken. You really can't make an intensely flavored gravy without them. These look amazing. Gold and it's rich, so you have like bits of bird and juices and just absolute rich loveliness. Do you ever just like sneak a piece of that? It's like so sweet. That is just packed full of flavor. Make sure that you watch Heather's episode of It's Elementary and see how to roast a turkey to be able to get this golden pan. I'm going to send you the invoice. Send me the invoice. So the first step of this is we're going to need to sort of separate the fat from the broth. If you don't have a centrifuge, which most people don't, I have a little trick for you. Pour the broth into this bag. All right. Then I'm going to bunch it up here. So I have all the broth and drippings and leavings from the turkey in here. You can see the fat is starting to collect at the top. So what I do is I have two measuring cups and then I'm going to click this and then we'll let all the broth drain out. When it starts, the fat starts to come down. I quickly move it over here and this is what I use for the fat. In genius, I know. Ready, go. Oh, fat. It actually worked, but it's messy. So I'm going to bring the pan over here. I like to use the cast iron pan because the bottom is thick and so the heat is distributed evenly there. So we're going to heat it up. I'm going to pour in my fat. So we have our fat kind of popping here. Now it's time to add a little bit of flour. I'm going to sprinkle it over the fat. I'm going to start to stir this to make a roux, which is really just a fancy name for a paste. The fat coats the flour, which helps it disperse in the liquid. It's okay if it's a little bit lumpy. All right. I'm going to pour in our broth, our drippings, our loveliness that came from the pan. Thank you, Heather. This would not be the same without it. So I like to add a little bit at first and start whisking. Smells really, really, really, really good. It's starting to bubble. I'm whisking in our paste, our roux. You can see it coming together. It's very, very, very thick. All right. So like I have a little bit of broth here on the side that is just basically store bought. I'm going to use this to loosen up a little bit. You have to always have this. If you make your gravy in the morning for Thanksgiving, you're serving it at three or god forbid at six o'clock. When you reheat it, it's going to be very thick. Whisk while it comes to a boil. Okay. So you see I'm starting to push it through. It's leaving a little bit of a path and it thickens enough to sort of spike your finger through. And you see that it's held its line. So we're good to go. This is an essential test. The next step is we want to season it. So salt and pepper, those are our basic seasonings. But be careful with this because if you're using drippings from a bird, all of that salt and seasoning is going to go into the bottom of the pan. So I tasted it first to see if it even needs salt. Often it doesn't. I'm going to stir it up and now I'm going to taste the sauce. Wow. I don't say this lightly. This is kind of like my grandma's gravy, right? Which is old school home cooking, which is very hard to get these days. Drippings are the key to this gravy. And you need to be able to roast a whole bird in order to get them. Don't use one of those disposable pans. It's very thin at the bottom because your drippings will all burn from that. So this is our basic turkey gravy. And now we're going to move on to a vegetarian mushroom gravy. The big question here is how do you make something as flavorful as the meat-based one? And the answer to that, mushrooms. These are nutty, woodsy, packed with flavor. And that word's going to come up again. Umami packed, right? Get the pan nice and hot. We're going to chop up an onion. I do a little v-cut to take the root out, which makes it easier to slice. This is my tip for doing. I start sort of as a v and I move over. This is a basic technique, okay? Slicing. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. Knock it over. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, right? They just all fall apart because of that v-cut. So easy. So now I'm going to take butter. Throw it into the pan. The butter you want to use because it's full of flavor. The milk solids are going to start to caramelize and brown and mimic the pound drippings, you know, from the meat-based one. You're going to have some people who prefer this gravy. Starting the brown there, we want that. I'm going to add the onions. Get those sizzling. I like to season as I go. Salt, salt, salt. Pepper mill. You see these little brown bits here? That's from the butter. Again, the milk solids are caramelizing and it's mimicking the drippings in the bottom of the pan. Keep that going, rip-roaring heat. Next, we're going to chop up the mushrooms. I'm using cremini mushrooms. You know what cremini mushrooms are? You know portabellos? These are the baby ones before they grow. I have this technique of once I start to chop and I make a flat end. I'll flip it over on that flat end and get those babies into the pan, sprinkling, sprinkling, sprinkling. I'm going to add a little bit of seasoning. I'm going to tell you a secret about mushrooms. Have you ever had canned mushrooms? They're kind of bloated and pale. That's what will happen to your mushrooms if you add them and start stirring like crazy. We really just want to leave them alone. It's so hard even for me not to stir but you've got to have some patience with this, right? Because we're building flavor here. This is the point where you're going to be like, ooh, I need to stir, ooh, I need to stir. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Give yourself a couple more seconds. Fight that urge. I'm going to sprinkle on my poultry seasoning here, right? Poultry seasoning. That sounds like a pretty weird thing to add to a vegetarian gravy, right? Well, there's no poultry in here. But what is in here? They're herbs of Thanksgiving. Sage, marjoram, thyme, oregano. It is a secret weapon for me in the kitchen. Now we're going to shake the pan and we're going to flip. See, see what I'm talking about here? Brown and caramelized. The parts that look a little darker are going to become light brown once you add the liquid. All right, next step. We're going to add our flour. We're making a roux again but with salt ingredients in there. Same thing. Go ahead and start stirring. It's going to start to get a little clumpy. The flour is adhering to the mushrooms and the onions. So you can see here that we have a mess of mushrooms and onions. We're starting to get bits on the bottom of the pan. Now I'm going to add the liquid. What I like to do is add a little bit first. Start to stir it. Loosen the roux a little bit. Not add it all at once. Right, I'm stirring. Starting to thicken. You see that there? Really lovely stuff here. Really lovely stuff. I'm going to add my soy sauce now. Soy sauce, you know, fermented soybeans. This is a friend in the kitchen. You can use it in so many things. It's one of my secret ingredients to my marinara sauce. I'm pouring a little bit more in. You can see it's starting to come together. Look at that. Wow. Again, you're going to let this come to a boil to let the flour thicken properly. If you just think it's done, once it looks sort of thick, you're not there yet. And it's going to have a raw taste. And it's just not going to be the experience that you want. I'm stirring really just to get up those yummy bits that caramelized on the bottom of the pan. The bubbles are starting to pop up. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. That's a professional term. So while that's happening, two finishing moves. Number one, a pat of cold butter. And that will taste very different than the cooked butter in this. And I'm going to swirl to incorporate it. This is called mounting in butter. It will give a smooth, glossy finish. If it just melts in, it'll be kind of greasy and broken at the top. Next thing is the lemon. Fresh lemon juice, people. I'm going to hold the halved lemon up like this so that when the juice runs through my fingers, but the seeds, hopefully, will fall fall into the palm of my hand instead of the food. All gravies have super long cooked flavors. So you want to finish it with something that will brighten it up. You want it to hit a lot of different notes, right? So here we're going to add some salt. Of course, some pepper. Final test. It's called the nappe test. Nappe means the coat in French. See that line there? It holds. That way we know it's going to lightly coat our turkey, our stuffing, our mashed potatoes. This is our mushroom vegetarian gravy. I like to make two gravies at Thanksgiving. This one is especially good for the darker, richer meats, like the drumstick or the thigh, whereas the classic with its long cooked flavors from the drippings will really super enhance the breast meat. You know, that typically, no matter what you do, is kind of dry. So next, we're moving on to the 24-hour gravy. What is this? It's a pull out all the stops gravy. That's just going to impress the hell out of everyone. What's going on here? We have a million different ingredients. Exactly. It's mission impossible here, right? The first step is when you make a stock, you want to use bones, right? We're not going to go out and get bones in the supermarket. So we start off with what? Chicken wings. These look great. They're going to add a ton of body to our broth, which is the beginning of our gravy. Okay. Moving over here, right? We've got a croquette or a stockpot. We're putting our chicken wings in our fat. Don't worry about it. Everything should go in there. And look at these pan drippings. I'm doing right by you guys, okay? We're going to deglaze those with what? Red wine. Pop that on there. You want to scrape these bits up into the wine. You can also just add water or broth or any liquid. Typically, you want to put this over a gas flame to help release it and help it boil, but you don't really need to do that. We're putting a lot of flavor here. All right. I'm going to pour that in with the wings. Okay. Now we're going to start our pinceage. What the heck is a pinceage? Well, it's just another crazy French term for mirepoix, which is onions, carrots, celery. All caramelized in the pan with a bunch of oozy gooey goodness. And that's going to form the aromatic base of our 24-hour gravy. So we have a pan here. I'm going to start with some bacon wine. Bacon's delicious. Again, I'm telling you, I'm putting everything in this. I'm pulling out all the stops. I'm going to add a little bit of olive oil to help this bacon render. Wow. This is smelling amazing. So we've got that going. I'm going to take my carrots, and I'm going to roughly chop them. I like doing like a little roll cut where I just cut down the middle, make these kind of oblique shapes. Throw those in. I'm not worried about the bacon being totally ready because this is going to cook for a long time. I'm going to take a head of garlic as well. I'm just going to split that in half. All this stuff is going to get strained out at the end. Tons of herbs here. Time, fresh thyme. Rosemary. Piney, resiny. Bay leaf. Slicing up our onions. All right. Throwing in the onions. Throwing this up. Getting it going. Getting it brown. While this is cooking down, I'm going to add a little bit of tomato paste. Tomato paste is a concentrate. It's going to make everything dark and rich. All right. So I'm stirring this up. You see it's starting to brown. It's starting to cook down. Okay. If memory serves me again with French, pince means to caramelize. So a pinceage is the thing that's caramelized. But let me know in the comments if I got that right. Something has been right here. I think I missed something. The celery. Oh my goodness. All these ingredients are there for a reason. So leave one of them out. It won't be the same. Wow. See that jammy? See that jammy caramelized bit right there? That's what you're looking for. What are we going to do next? We're going to take a whole bottle of wine. We're going to add the whole thing. That's right. The whole bottle of wine is gone. It's in the pinceage. We're going to start boiling this down. You don't want to use cheap wine or wine that you wouldn't want to drink. This is going to make a big difference. So this is going to start to simmer. And this is going to start to reduce. We want to get it to the point where it's almost syrupy. The pinceage with the red wine is taking a little bit of time to reduce. I'm putting an empty pan on the burner. And heating it is screeching hot. I'm going to pour our syrupy pinceage in there. It's going to reduce really quickly. This is starting to get really syrupy and yummy. This is going to go in with our wings. I'm going to pour this in. Next step, I have dried shiitakes here. We're going to add those in. We're going to add some bay leaf. Then we're going to make a big bouquet garni which is just like parsley, tarragon, thyme, sage, fresh herbs. I'm going to tie them all together. That's going to go in here. Now we're going to add water to create our broth or stock. It needs to go like four inches above the surface. I'm going to cover. Bring it to a boil. We brought our delicious multi-layered broth stock that will eventually be our gravy up to a boil. I'm going to turn down the heat. We're going to simmer this for eight hours. When this is done, after eight hours, you can cheat, maybe do six hours. You're going to let it cool. You're going to put it in the fridge. Let's sit overnight. Here we have our broth or stock that we put in the fridge overnight. Then we took it out, peeled back the fat, added that or saved it for another use. We had to heat it up a little bit so that we could strain it. I've improvised here with some cheesecloth. That's wet, which makes it easier to strain. We're going to mash this down to release the liquid. We're pushing it through. You can see it dripping in here. Put our solids over here. I'm going to bring this over to the stove to heat up. Now we're going to make our gumbo roux. What's that? It's basically the roux I've showed you how to make already. We're going to cook it for a long time until it becomes a consistency of peanut butter or almond butter. We have a miniature cast iron skillet here. We're going to bring it onto the heat. We're going to add our butter. We're going to melt that down. Again, we don't care if it browns. It's going to be browning during this process. Swirl the butter. Just waves of splendid butter pleasure right here just folding onto itself. Fantastic. I'm going to dump in the flour. Sprinkle that over the top. Stir that in. As you can see here, the roux starts to look a little bit like our basic or fundamental gravy here. It almost looks like a caramel sauce. We're cooking this for about 10 minutes. You can see it's really gotten the consistency of peanut butter or almond butter. I'm going to move this off. I'm going to move our strained broth over. Boom. Now I'm going to take our gumbo roux and I'm going to pour it into our broth. This is basically the gravy of your dreams. Now I'm going to turn this down and let it simmer a little bit just to thicken up. Look at this. This looks luscious. This has 24 ingredients. But let's not forget the other ingredients. The ones that are always there helping us out during Thanksgiving. Time and love. We put a lot of time and love in this. We're not done yet. We want to balance this gravy. It's a delicate, precise thing. First, we're going to do some mounting of cold butter, which is a technique I've already taught you. Again, the butter must be cold. That's looking great. Now we're going to really up this. Plus, plus, plus, plus. Turn it up to 11. I'm going to take some Frank's hot sauce. A couple of drops. Don't go crazy. I'm going to take a little bit of soy sauce. A little bit of sherry vinegar. Again, just a couple of drops. Don't forget the salt. Pepper. Looks great. Now it's time for the taste test. That is so good. What's Thanksgiving if you can't show off for your friends and family, right? This is going to knock them over the head. Thanks so much for joining me today on our gravy extravaganza. I've showed you how to make it three ways. Number one, the basic gravy. Rue and drippings. Number two, vegetarian mushroom gravy. Strong backbone from the sauteed mushrooms. And number three, the show stopping 24 hours, 24 ingredients, it's elementary. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe to The Spruce Eats for more it's elementary episodes and more great cooking videos on every subject. Thanks for watching.