Kettle Gravy

Sometimes there is no hob available, or all four rings are busy and the gravy is the thing that gets left out. This one needs boiling water and a jug. Granules do the thickening because they are designed to work with hot water alone, and everything else you add is there to make it taste like it did not come from a jug.

Ingredients

Makes about 300ml, enough for two plates

• 3 tbsp gravy granules
• 300ml (½ pint) boiling water from a freshly boiled kettle
• 15g (½oz) butter or a sachet of butter if you are travelling
• 1 tsp onion granules optional but it is what makes this taste cooked
• ½ tsp brown sauce or ketchup a sachet is fine
• black pepper to taste

Kit

• Heatproof jug, at least 750ml
• Kettle
• Small whisk or fork
• Saucer to cover

Method

1. Put the granules, onion granules and the butter into a dry heatproof jug. Doing this before the water goes anywhere near is what gets the butter melting evenly through the whole thing.

2. Boil the kettle and let it stand for about ten seconds after it clicks off. Water straight off a rolling boil is fine, but a moment of standing means less chance of it spitting up at you out of a narrow jug.

3. Pour in about a third of the water and whisk immediately and hard. It goes very thick very quickly. Break up every lump at this stage, while there is little enough liquid that the whisk can actually work against the sides.

4. Add the rest of the water in two goes, whisking well between them. By the end it should be smooth and pourable.

5. Cover the jug with a saucer and leave it to stand for two minutes. This is the closest you get to simmering without a hob and it lets the granules fully hydrate and the onion granules soften.

6. Whisk once more, stir in the brown sauce or ketchup and grind in pepper. If it has gone thicker than you want during standing, top up with a little more hot water from the kettle.

7. Serve straight from the jug. Without a pan to keep it hot it cools faster than usual, so warm the plates if you can, even if that just means running them under the hot tap and drying them.

Tips worth knowing

• Use a jug at least twice the volume of the gravy. Whisking hot liquid in a jug that is nearly full is how you end up with gravy on the ceiling and on your hand.
• Cold butter dropped into hot granules gives a better texture than melted butter stirred in later, because it emulsifies as it goes.
• Onion granules genuinely do the heavy lifting here. Without a pan you cannot brown anything, and dried onion is the nearest honest substitute.
• If there is a microwave in the room, a thirty second blast after the standing time gets it properly hot and improves it noticeably.

Keeping and reheating

This one is made to be poured hot from the jug, not stored. If you must, it keeps a day in the fridge and needs a microwave or a pan to bring it back, at which point you may as well have made a better gravy.

Questions people ask