Camping Stove Gravy

Camping stoves are hot in a two inch circle in the middle and cold everywhere else, which is exactly the wrong shape for making a gravy. The fix is to keep the pan moving, use granules rather than a roux, and add the fat last so nothing splits. Everything here travels without a fridge, which matters more than it sounds when you are three days into a trip.

Ingredients

Makes about 300ml, enough for two camp plates

• 3 tbsp gravy granules decant into a small tub, the tubs are bulky
• 1 tsp onion granules
• 1 sachet of tomato ketchup or brown sauce or a teaspoon from a squeezy bottle
• 300ml (½ pint) water
• 1 sachet or small block of butter butter keeps unrefrigerated for a couple of days in cool weather, or use a squeeze of oil
• black pepper to taste

Kit

• Single burner camping stove
• Small pan with a lid
• Long handled spoon
• Windshield if you have one

Method

1. Set the stove up out of the wind, with a windshield if you have one. Wind is the single biggest thing standing between you and a hot gravy, and a stove fighting a breeze will take twice as long and burn through gas.

2. Put the water in the pan and bring it to the boil with the lid on. The lid saves a genuinely useful amount of gas and time.

3. Take the pan off the burner or turn the flame right down. Do not add granules to water sitting on a full flame, because a camping burner will scorch the base in the middle before you can whisk it.

4. Sprinkle in the granules and the onion granules while stirring hard with the spoon. Work from the centre out, since the middle of the pan is hottest and that is where it will thicken first and lump if you let it.

5. Put the pan back on a low flame for a minute, stirring constantly and lifting it off the heat for a couple of seconds whenever it starts spitting. Constant motion is the whole technique here.

6. Take it off the heat for good. Stir in the ketchup or brown sauce and the butter, and keep stirring until the butter has disappeared.

7. Pepper it, put the lid back on and let it sit for a minute while you plate up. Outdoors it cools fast, so serve it last and serve it into something with sides rather than onto a flat plate.

Tips worth knowing

• Decant granules into a small screw top tub before you go. It halves the volume in your bag and there is no cardboard to go soggy.
• Adding the butter off the heat stops it splitting on a fierce burner, and it goes in cold so it barely cools the gravy at all.
• If you are cooking sausages or bacon on the same stove first, do not wipe the pan out. Add the water straight into it and scrape, exactly as you would at home.
• Wash the pan while it is still warm with a splash of hot water. Set gravy on cold aluminium in a field is a proper job to shift.

Keeping and reheating

Eat it there. Made outdoors with no fridge to put it in, leftover gravy is not worth keeping, so make the amount you will actually eat and scale the recipe by the quantity of water.

Questions people ask