Chip Shop Style Gravy at Home

Sometimes you want chips and gravy on a Tuesday and you are not making stock. Granules on their own taste thin and salty, but a few additions get them a long way closer to what comes out of the urn. This is a cheat and it is not pretending otherwise. It is also genuinely good, and it takes about ten minutes from standing start to gravy on chips.

Ingredients

Makes about 450ml, enough for four portions of chips

• 1 small onion quartered, it gets fished out
• 600ml (1 pint) boiling water
• 5 tbsp beef gravy granules a heaped measure, more than the packet says
• 1 tsp Marmite
• 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp cornflour slaked in 2 tbsp cold water
• white pepper

Kit

• Small saucepan
• Whisk
• Small bowl

Method

1. Put the quartered onion in a saucepan with the boiling water and simmer hard for 6 minutes. This gives you onion water rather than plain water, and it is the single biggest improvement you can make to granule gravy for almost no effort.

2. Fish the onion out with a slotted spoon and press it against the side of the pan first to squeeze the liquid back in. Keep the pan on a low heat.

3. Whisk in the Marmite until it dissolves completely, then the Worcestershire sauce and soy.

4. Take the pan off the heat and rain the granules in while whisking hard. Adding them off a rolling boil stops them clumping into lumps that never break down.

5. Put it back on a low heat and simmer for 2 minutes, whisking, until it is smooth and glossy. It will look like normal gravy at this point, which is still too thin for chips.

6. Stir the cornflour slurry and whisk it in. Simmer for another 2 minutes. This is what takes it from dinner gravy to chip shop gravy, thick enough to sit on top rather than run through.

7. Test a spoonful on a cold plate. It should hold a low mound. Season with white pepper, taste, and only add salt if it genuinely needs it, which with granules and Marmite it almost never does.

Tips worth knowing

• Use more granules than the packet says and thicken with cornflour on top. Chip shop gravy is much thicker than the packet instructions are aiming for.
• Off the heat when the granules go in, every time. Tipping granules into boiling liquid is the classic route to lumps.
• If you do get lumps, a stick blender sorts it in five seconds and nobody will ever know.
• Keep a jar of granules and a bottle of Marmite together in the cupboard. This is a ten minute gravy and treating it as one is the point.

Keeping and reheating

Keeps 3 days in the fridge, where it sets very firm. Reheat in a pan with a splash of water and whisk hard. Freezing works but the texture goes slightly grainy, and given it takes ten minutes there is little point.

Questions people ask