[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
There are a number of different ways of making gravy. I don’t always put onions with my gravy but it goes well with roast beef. With roast beef I often just add a bit of red wine to the drippings and onions, add, a bit of beef stock, thyme, melted butter and reduce it all a bit then add a little flour and bring it to the consistency I want.
The key is always good ingredients and knowing the techniques. When I’ve got the time sometimes I make a real stock and use real stock for my gravy instead of the supermarket stock. Gravy made from real stock is much nicer and it’s really worth the effort of making some good homemade stock. Bon appetit![/quote]
I am going to see if I can get the wife to make some gravy like this. Thanks for the tip. [/quote]
Let me know how it goes. But don’t blame me if she makes me a mess of it. 
There are thousands of recipes on the internet consisting of my or all the ingredients I listed. Choose a good recipe to get the proportions and order/technique. Gravy is used a lot in English cooking and my paternal grandmother used to make me a special meal every Sunday night. Often with gravy.
Edit: Bangers and mash was probably my favourite. But you’ve got to get good, authentic English pork sausages or it tastes crap. English pork sausages cooked very slowly turning occasionally till they’re golden brown and they start to split. Don’t pierce first, that’s just a myth about them exploding. Cook down lots of onions - onions reduce in size a lot when you caramelise them so even for two people you’d need at least four medium size onions.
Reduce onions in pan when they’re caramelised, brown and there’s a brown(not black) sticky residue on the surface of the pan. This is the stuff you want to “deglaze” - this is how you get that really nice sauce or sauce. Remove onions and add something like verjuice, but you can always use wine and/or stock. But verjuice is superior because it had a sort of solvent effect that draws up the flavours more than stock or wine. Alcohol has the same property so in some dishes they use a spirit like brandy or whiskey. Oh, and some like to add a little pinch of brown sugar. Some recipes like to add Worcestershire sauce and other spices. Don’t ruin it with spices though.
Turn up to a medium heat and vigorously scrape up all the brown sticky residue from the surface of it the pan and dissolve it in the verjuice or wine/stock. Remember to make sure there’s nothing black because that is carcinogenic. You want a yellow to golden brown colour.
And then as I said about reduce and taste as you reduce the mix to get the right strength of flavour, add a little flour to thicken, Or, if you’re making a French style Au jus then you don’t add any stock or flour. Au jus is just the meat sauce.
With actual gravies, some recipes use a pinch of corn starch or starch instead of flour and some recipes use shallots instead of regular onions. Traditionally you use red wine with red meats and white wine with white meats. There’s also a range of seafood sauces and white sauces that usually have a cheese or dairy base, but that’s off topic. Anyway, let us know how your gravy goes when you get round to it.
Edited
