How To Make Brown Gravy

Hi, there. I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Hi, there.

I'm going to show you how to make brown gravy. So the first thing we need to do is just take out what we're roasting off in the oven. Now, in this case, I've just got some chicken wings, but the chances are, if you're making gravy, you probably may have a chicken, or a joint of beef, or pork, lamb, you know, whatever it is.

But the principle is the same. You take whatever it is you're roasting out, and what you are left with in the pan is quite a lot of residual fat, and all those flavors in the pan, and that's how we're going to make our gravy. So, I'm going to put that on there, and the first thing I'm going to do is just bring it up to a reasonable temperature, so just leave it for a second.

Obviously, you don't want to, rather you want to keep your eye on this, because I have seen many of these just get burned completely. I'm going to put a tablespoon of that in, and I'm now going to take that off the heat before it gets too hot, because that residual fat is really starting to get hot. And just try, and in fact, I'm going to do this off the heat.

But what you want to try and do now is just scrape all that flavors into the fat and the flour. Now that flour is a roux, it's what we call a roux, and that's what's going to thicken it out. I'm going to add some chicken stock here.

This is a fresh stock. Oops! Bit of drama there. We like a bit of drama on Video Jug.

Proper epic, it is. It's got everything. So what I'm going to do now is just incorporate that chicken stock.

So, what I was saying before the fire, was you can use stock cube, so all you would do is get a stock cube, add boiling water, and have a jug. I'm using fresh because, you know, I prefer using fresh. And all I'm going to do now is just cook that stock down, and what will happen is, in the next two or three minutes, the volume of liquid in that pan will reduce down.

I'm going to keep an eye on the temperature though, for the reasons I said earlier on. You don't want the pan to be too hot, and also as you can see, what I'm doing is just moving it around, obviously with a cloth, to ensure that no one part of this pan gets so hot that, you know, there's a risk that it might burn. So, I'm going to carry on cooking this down until it reduces down, and then what I'll do is pass the final gravy through this sieve.

This has been on the hob now for about three or four minutes. You'll see in a minute, it's thickened out really nicely. I'm just going to take that off the hob.

Now it's still quite bitty, from all the bits of flavor that were in the bottom of the pan, and we obviously want to get rid of as much of that as possible, so what I'm now going to do is just pass that through the sieve. And I just want to show you the consistency of what we're working with here, because it started off, obviously if you look at the stock, the stock's quite watery, like that. However, if we look at the gravy, the gravy's now got a nice thickness to it.

That's how to make your brown gravy.