Roast Beef Gravy without Meat Juices

Sometimes there are no juices. The beef was cooked in a slow cooker, or it was a small joint on a rack, or you are making gravy for people who are not eating the same meat. This one builds the missing browning deliberately, layer by layer, and it fools most people at the table.

Ingredients

Makes about 700ml, enough for six plates

• 40g butter
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 100g (3 1/2oz) mushrooms, chopped small
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 2 tbsp (30g) plain flour
• 800ml (1 1/2 pints) hot beef stock use two cubes or a stock pot for strength
• 1 tsp Marmite
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp mushroom ketchup or dark soy
• 1 tsp red wine vinegar
• salt and black pepper

Kit

• Heavy saucepan
• Wooden spoon
• Whisk
• Sieve

Method

1. Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan over a medium heat and keep going past the foaming stage until the milk solids at the bottom turn brown and it smells nutty, which takes three or four minutes. Browned butter is your first layer of the flavour you would normally get from the tin.

2. Add the onion straight away to stop the butter burning and cook for eight minutes until soft and well coloured, letting it catch a little on the base and scraping it back in.

3. Turn the heat up, add the mushrooms and fry hard for eight minutes until they have released their water, reabsorbed it and gone properly brown at the edges. Chopped small, they will melt into the gravy later.

4. Push everything to one side, add the tomato puree to the bare patch and fry it on its own for two minutes until it darkens from red to brick, then stir it through. Cooked puree tastes savoury, raw puree tastes sharp.

5. Stir in the flour and cook for three minutes, a minute longer than you would in a roasting tin, since here the toasted flour is doing real work on colour and flavour.

6. Add the hot stock a third at a time, whisking hard. Bring to a simmer and cook for twelve to fifteen minutes so everything melds and the mushrooms give up the last of their savour.

7. Whisk in the Marmite, Worcestershire sauce and mushroom ketchup. Taste at this point before adding any salt, because those three are all salty.

8. Blitz briefly with a stick blender and pass through a sieve for a smooth gravy with real body, then sharpen with the vinegar and finish with black pepper.

Tips worth knowing

• Do not skip the browned butter. Melted butter and browned butter are two different ingredients and the second one is why this gravy tastes roasted.
• Use more stock concentrate than the packet suggests and less water. A weak stock is the main reason gravy without drippings tastes hollow.
• Made a day ahead this is noticeably better, as the mushroom and onion flavours settle. It is a good gravy to have in the freezer for emergencies.
• If you happen to have a beef bone or a bit of leftover roast, drop it into the simmering gravy for ten minutes and fish it out before blending.

Keeping and reheating

Keeps five days in the fridge and freezes for three months. It reheats better than most pan gravies because there is no meat juice in it to go stale, so make a double batch.

Questions people ask