Cranberry and Orange Christmas Gravy

There is a good argument that cranberry sauce belongs in the gravy rather than beside it. It stops the plate turning into a set of separate puddles, and the acidity does the job that a squeeze of lemon does in any other sauce. Keep it restrained and it tastes like gravy with a lift, not like pudding.

Ingredients

Makes about 800ml, enough for eight plates

• 3 tbsp fat from the turkey tin
• 1 banana shallot finely chopped
• 3 tbsp (45g) plain flour
• 100ml (3 1/2fl oz) ruby port
• 800ml (1 1/2 pints) hot turkey or chicken stock
• 3 tbsp cranberry sauce whole berry, not jelly
• 1 orange zest of all, juice of half
• 1 tsp red wine vinegar
• sea salt and black pepper

Kit

• Roasting tin
• Whisk
• Fine grater
• Sieve

Method

1. Lift the turkey out to rest and pour off all but three tablespoons of fat from the tin, keeping the brown residue. Set the tin over a medium heat, add the shallot and cook it in the fat for four minutes until soft and just starting to colour at the edges.

2. Stir in the flour and cook it hard for two minutes, scraping the base as you go. It should turn a shade darker and stop smelling of raw flour. The shallot will disappear into the roux, which is fine.

3. Pour in the port and whisk immediately. It will hiss and thicken into a paste. Keep scraping until the brown crust has lifted off the tin and the port has reduced by about half, roughly two minutes.

4. Add the hot stock in three goes, whisking each addition until smooth before the next. Bring it to a simmer and let it bubble gently for eight minutes, stirring now and then, until it coats the back of a spoon.

5. Stir in the cranberry sauce and let it melt out. Whole berry sauce will leave a few skins behind, so if you want it silky, push the whole lot through a sieve now. If you like the flecks, leave them in.

6. Take it off the heat and add the orange zest and the juice of half the orange. Adding the zest off the heat keeps the top notes, boiling it just makes it taste of marmalade.

7. Add the vinegar, then taste. Cranberry sauce carries a lot of sugar, so if it tastes sweet rather than savoury, add more vinegar a quarter teaspoon at a time until it snaps back. Season and pour into a warm jug.

Tips worth knowing

• Use whole berry cranberry sauce, not the jellied kind in a tin. Jellied sauce is mostly sugar and pectin and will make the gravy claggy and oddly bouncy.
• Zest the orange before you juice it. Everyone learns this the hard way exactly once.
• If you are also serving cranberry sauce on the side, cut the amount in the gravy to two tablespoons so the plate is not all one note.
• This gravy sets very firm in the fridge because of the pectin. Reheat it with an extra splash of stock rather than water so you do not dilute the flavour.

Keeping and reheating

Keeps three days in the fridge in a covered tub, cooled quickly in a shallow container. It freezes for three months but the fruit can go slightly grainy, so blitz it briefly with a stick blender after reheating. Bring to a rolling boil before serving.

Questions people ask