Five Ingredient Gravy
Butter, flour, stock, onion and a spoon of jelly. Five things, nothing else, and every one of them earning its place.
- Vegetarian
- minimal
- five ingredients
- onion
- back to basics
- Prep
- 3 min
- Cook
- 14 min
- Total
- 17 min
- Serves
- 4
- Difficulty
- Easy
A deliberate exercise in stripping things back. Most quick gravies carry two or three bottles of savoury extras that are covering for something. Take them all away and what you are left with has to be right, which means the onion has to be browned properly and the stock has to be strong. It is a good recipe to learn because it teaches you which bits actually matter.
Ingredients
Makes about 450ml, enough for four plates
Scaled amounts are rounded to something you can actually measure. Season at the end and trust your mouth over the maths.
Kit
- Saucepan
- Wooden spoon
- Whisk
Method
Melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat. Use all 40g, because with only five ingredients the butter is carrying more of the flavour than it would in a bigger recipe.
Add the sliced onion and a pinch of salt and cook for eight to ten minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. Take it well past soft and into properly brown at the edges. With nothing else in the pan to hide behind, this browning is the whole character of the gravy.
Stir in the flour and cook it for a minute and a half, scraping the base as you go so the onion sugars do not catch.
Add a third of the hot stock and whisk hard. The flour and onion will clump together at first, which is fine, and it comes smooth as you keep going.
Pour in the rest of the stock, whisk, and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook for five minutes, stirring occasionally, until it thickens and the onions have gone soft enough to almost disappear into it.
Stir in the jelly and let it dissolve completely. That single spoonful is doing three jobs, adding sweetness, adding a bit of fruit acidity and adding gloss, which is why it is worth one of the five slots.
Season with salt and plenty of black pepper. This is one of the few recipes on the site where you probably will need salt, because there is no soy, no yeast extract and no Worcestershire sauce carrying any.
Tips worth knowing
- Make the stock stronger than you normally would. With so few ingredients there is nowhere to hide a weak stock.
- If you only have redcurrant jelly for the roast lamb and do not want to open it, a teaspoon of marmalade or a spoon of apple sauce does a similar job.
- Blitz it smooth with a stick blender if you want a restaurant look, since the onion gives it plenty of body without any extra thickener.
- This is the recipe to keep in your head. Once you know it, you can build almost any other gravy on the site by adding to it.
Change it up
- Swap the jelly for a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar for something sharper and darker that suits sausages.
- Use half beef and half chicken stock, which gives a rounder flavour than either on its own.
- Use olive oil instead of butter and a fruit jelly with no gelatine in it to make the whole thing vegan.
Keeping and reheating
Four days in the fridge and three months in the freezer. It reheats beautifully because there is nothing fragile in it. Loosen with water and whisk as it warms.
Questions people ask
What are the basic ingredients of gravy?
Fat, flour and liquid. Everything else is flavouring. Get those three in the right ratio, roughly 25g of fat and 25g of flour to 500ml of liquid for a pouring gravy, and you have the skeleton of every gravy on this site.
Can you make gravy with just flour and water?
You can thicken water with flour, but it will taste of nothing. At the absolute minimum you need something savoury in the liquid, which usually means stock, and some fat, which usually means butter or the fat from a pan.
Do you need onion in gravy?
No, but it is the cheapest way to add real depth. A browned onion contributes sweetness, colour and roasted flavour that you would otherwise have to buy in a bottle. If you leave it out, expect to compensate with soy sauce or yeast extract.