How To Make Traditional Gravy

Gravy is the sauce you build out of what is already stuck to the bottom of the roasting pan. Done right it is glossy, savory, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and thin enough to run off it, and it tastes unmistakably of the thing you just roasted. Done wrong it is either wallpaper paste or brown water, and both failures come from the same place: the ratio.

Difficulty is low. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes and happens while the meat is resting, which is exactly the window you have. This makes about 2 cups, enough for four people who like gravy.

The one thing to understand before you start is that gravy is a ratio, not a recipe. Equal volumes of fat and flour, then eight times that volume in liquid. Hold that and you can make gravy out of anything. Ignore it and no amount of stirring will save you.

Equipment

Three things do the work, and I stock all three.

• Enameled Cast Iron Roasting Pan, 12x8 in.. Gravy starts in the pan the meat came out of, set directly over a burner. That means the pan has to be stovetop safe, which rules out most disposable and glass roasters. Enameled cast iron also holds heat steadily enough to cook a roux without hot spots scorching it.
• 5-Ply Stainless Steel Saucepan with Lid. For stock-based gravy, or for finishing when the roasting pan is needed elsewhere. Five bonded layers running up the sides matter here more than in most pans, because a roux sits still against hot metal and a thin pan scorches it in seconds.
• Stainless Steel Whisk. A wooden spoon will not break up flour lumps once they form. A whisk prevents them from forming at all, which is the only reliable fix. The 8 inch is the right size for a roasting pan.

You will also want a fat separator and a fine mesh strainer. I do not stock either one, and I am not going to point you at something that does a different job. A tall narrow measuring cup and a spoon will separate fat if you give it five minutes to settle, and a strainer is only needed if something has gone wrong.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup fat, separated from the pan drippings
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 cups stock, warm, matching the meat you roasted
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, only if the drippings ran short of fat
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
• Salt and black pepper, to taste

About the drippings

What is in the bottom of the pan is two different things and they behave differently. There is rendered fat, which is the cooking medium for the roux. There is also the fond, meaning the browned juices and stuck bits, which is the flavor. You want all of the fond and only a measured quarter cup of the fat.

Roast in a pan close to the size of the bird. A large pan under a small chicken spreads the juices thin across hot metal and they burn rather than brown, and burnt fond makes bitter gravy that cannot be rescued.

Warm your stock before it goes in. Cold stock hitting a hot roux drops the pan temperature and gives the flour time to clump before it disperses.

Method

Before you start

Set up your mise en place. Measure the flour, warm the stock, strip the thyme leaves, and have the whisk in your hand before the roast comes out. Gravy is made in the resting window and there is no pausing partway through a roux.

Confirm the roast is actually done first. Gravy is built on drippings, so the roast has to be finished before you can start. USDA FSIS puts poultry, whole or in pieces, at 165F measured in the thickest part of the thigh and breast, away from bone. Beef, pork, veal and lamb roasts are 145F followed by a three minute rest. Check with a thermometer rather than by color, because color is not a reliable signal in either direction.

Separate the fat

Lift the meat out and pour off the drippings. Move the roast to a board to rest and tip everything liquid from the pan into a tall narrow cup, scraping loose anything that comes easily. Leave the stuck fond in the pan. It is not going to pour and you do not want it to.

Let it settle, then skim. Give it five minutes. The fat rises into a clear layer on top and the dark juices sink. Spoon off 1/4 cup of the fat and reserve it. Keep the juices underneath; they go back in later and they are half the flavor. If you finish short of a quarter cup of fat, top it up with butter rather than stretching what you have.

Build the roux

Return the fat to the pan and set it over medium heat. Put the roasting pan across one or two burners with the reserved 1/4 cup fat in it. Two burners on a long pan heat more evenly than one burner under the middle.

Whisk in the flour and cook it out. Add the 1/4 cup flour all at once and whisk constantly until the paste smells nutty and toasted and turns the color of light peanut butter, about 3 minutes. This step is not optional. Raw flour tastes like raw flour and simmering will not remove it later. Keep the whisk moving the entire time, because a roux goes from toasted to burnt faster than you expect.

Scrape the fond loose as you go. The whisking should be lifting the browned bits off the bottom of the pan and into the roux. Anything still welded to the pan is flavor you are leaving behind.

Add the liquid

Pour in the warm stock in three additions, whisking hard. Add about a third, whisk until it is completely smooth, then repeat twice. Adding all the liquid at once is the single most common cause of lumps, because the flour hydrates on the outside of a clump and seals the dry center in.

Add the reserved pan juices. Pour in the dark juices you kept back under the fat. This is where most of the roasted flavor lives.

Simmer until it coats a spoon. Bring it to a gentle simmer, add the thyme, and cook until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a line when you draw a finger through it, about 5 minutes. Gravy thickens further as it cools, so stop slightly thinner than you want it on the plate. If it goes too far, whisk in more warm stock a splash at a time.

Season and serve

Season last, and taste first. Salt and pepper only at the end. Drippings from a seasoned or brined roast carry a great deal of salt already, and the gravy has just reduced, which concentrates whatever was there. Add in small amounts.

Strain only if you need to. A few lumps come out with a hard whisk. If it is genuinely lumpy, pass it through a fine mesh strainer. Serve hot; gravy skins over quickly as it sits.

Variations

Stock-only gravy, no drippings. The make-ahead version, and the one worth knowing if you are cooking a holiday meal. Melt 1/4 cup butter in a saucepan, whisk in 1/4 cup flour, cook the roux to light peanut butter color, then add 2 cups of good stock the same way. It will be flatter than a drippings gravy because there is no fond, so build the flavor back with a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a splash of soy sauce or Worcestershire for depth. Made a day ahead it reheats gently with a little added stock, and it means the gravy is not competing for your attention while the bird rests.

Slurry instead of roux. Whisk 3 tablespoons cornstarch into 1/4 cup cold water until smooth, bring your liquid to a simmer, then stream the slurry in until it thickens. It is faster, it stays glossy and clear rather than opaque, and it is the right call when the drippings gave up almost no fat. The trade is flavor: you skip the toasted roux entirely, so the result tastes cleaner and less deep. Never add cornstarch to hot liquid dry, and never boil a cornstarch gravy hard for long, because the starch breaks down and it thins back out.

Giblet gravy. Simmer the neck, heart and gizzard in 3 cups water with half an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns for about an hour while the bird roasts, then strain and use that as your stock. Add the liver only for the last 15 minutes; simmered longer it turns the whole batch bitter and metallic. Chop the meat off the neck and dice the gizzard and heart, and stir them in at the end. A chopped hard-boiled egg goes in at this point in a lot of Southern kitchens.

Gluten-free. Cornstarch slurry as above is the simplest route and the most reliable. If you want the roux, sweet rice flour behaves closest to wheat and cooks out the same way at the same ratio. Standard gluten-free all-purpose blends work but need a slightly longer simmer to lose their texture. Do not use regular rice flour, which stays gritty.

Sausage gravy. A different animal, built for biscuits rather than roast meat. Brown 1 pound of bulk breakfast sausage in a skillet, leave the meat and the rendered fat in the pan, whisk 1/4 cup flour into that fat, cook it out, then add 2 cups whole milk instead of stock. Finish with a heavy hand of black pepper. Milk scorches faster than stock, so keep the heat lower and the whisk moving, and do not let it boil.

Make ahead, storage and reheating

Make ahead. The stock-only version above is the one to make in advance, up to two days. A drippings gravy cannot be made ahead by definition, but you can make a stock-only base ahead and whisk the fresh drippings into it on the day, which gets you most of the flavor with none of the last minute pressure. This is what I would actually do for a holiday.

Refrigerating. Cool it quickly in a shallow container rather than leaving a deep pot on the stove, and refrigerate within two hours. It keeps 3 to 4 days. It will set to a firm jelly when cold, which is normal and means your stock had body.

Freezing. Flour-thickened gravy freezes acceptably for about 3 months, though it often separates slightly on thawing and needs hard whisking to come back. Cornstarch-thickened gravy does not freeze; it goes spongy and weeps. Freeze the roux-based version or none at all.

Reheating. Low heat, whisking, adding warm stock a splash at a time to loosen it. Do not microwave it in one long burst, which cooks the edges into skin while the middle is still cold.

Where the word comes from

Gravy first appears in English around 1390, in The Forme of Cury, the recipe collection attributed to the master cooks of Richard II. The dish it named then was not what is on this page. Connyngs in Grauey was rabbit in a broth thickened with ground almonds and sweetened with sugar and ginger, closer to a medieval spiced stew than to a pan sauce.

The usual explanation for the word is a scribal accident. Old French had grané, meaning roughly grained or seasoned, from Latin granum. In medieval manuscript hands the letter u served for v in the middle of a word, so grané is easy to misread as gravé, and the theory holds that English copyists made that mistake and the misspelling stuck.

It is worth knowing that this is not settled. The mistranscription argument traces back to the nineteenth century French lexicographer Frédéric Godefroy, and he has been criticised for adjusting the spellings in his own citations to fit the theory. Etymonline notes the problem directly. The OED records the derivation as probable rather than certain. So the story is plausible and widely repeated, and it may also be a tidy explanation built backwards from an assumption.

What is not in doubt is the technique. Thickening a meat sauce with cooked flour and fat is French method, systematised as roux in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the ratio at the top of this page is that same method scaled to a domestic roasting pan.

Nutritional Comparison (Per 1/4-Cup Serving)

Estimates, not laboratory measurements, and they cover a gravy built to the ratio at the top of this page.

References

• Meat and Poultry Roasting Charts, FoodSafety.gov. The doneness temperatures for the roast your drippings come from, including 165F for all poultry and 145F with a three minute rest for beef, pork, veal and lamb roasts.
• Cold Food Storage Chart, FoodSafety.gov. The 3 to 4 day refrigerated storage window that applies to a pan of gravy, plus the two hour rule for cooling it in the first place.

Related Guides

• Classic Espagnole Mother Sauce, the formal brown sauce this gravy is a domestic cousin of, built on the same brown roux over a much longer timeline
• Classic Velouté Mother Sauce, the same fat-flour-stock ratio taken pale instead of brown, which is the clearest way to see what cooking the roux further actually does
• Smoked Beef Ribs with Duchess Potatoes, a roast worth building a pan gravy around

Thank you

Thank you for cooking this one. Gravy tends to get made in a hurry at the worst possible moment, with people waiting, and it is worth the fifteen minutes of attention it asks for. If you need a roast to put it on, the Smoked Beef Ribs with Duchess Potatoes above is a good place to start.

If you make it, tell me how it went and what you changed. You can reach me here.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.

Chef Alan, 35 years in professional kitchens and a six-time Four Diamond chef
Wine Drop Cookery