Roasted Vegetable and Beef Bone Gravy
Twice as much roasted vegetable as usual alongside the beef bones, giving a sweeter, rounder gravy that leans on caramelised veg as much as meat.
- Contains meat
- beef
- roasted vegetables
- parsnip
- celeriac
- sunday roast
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 5 hrs
- Total
- 5 hr 25 min
- Serves
- 8
- Difficulty
- Medium
Most stock recipes treat the vegetables as background. This one flips that, roasting a proper tray of onion, carrot, parsnip, celeriac and garlic until they are properly caramelised, then using beef bones for depth underneath. The result is sweeter and rounder than a straight bone gravy and it goes beautifully with roast root vegetables.
Ingredients
Makes about 750ml
Scaled amounts are rounded to something you can actually measure. Season at the end and trust your mouth over the maths.
Kit
- Two roasting tins
- Large saucepan
- Fine sieve
- Stick blender
- Whisk
Method
Heat the oven to 210C fan (230C conventional, gas 8). Put the bones in one tin and all the vegetables tossed in the oil in a second. Two tins matter here, because a single crowded tin steams the vegetables rather than caramelising them and you lose the entire point of the recipe.
Roast both for 45 minutes. Turn the vegetables twice so they colour evenly and go properly brown at the edges, not just soft. Add the tomato purée to the bone tin for the last 15 minutes.
Set aside about a quarter of the roasted vegetables, the best looking pieces, and keep them somewhere warm. They go back in later to thicken and sweeten the gravy.
Scrape the bones and the remaining vegetables into a saucepan, deglaze both tins with water and add that in. Cover with 2.5 litres of cold water.
Bring slowly to a simmer, skim, add the thyme and bay and hold at a bare tremble for 4 hours. The vegetables will collapse completely, which is fine, they have given everything to the liquid by then.
Strain, pressing the softened vegetables through the sieve with the back of a ladle to get some body into the stock. Chill briefly and take the fat off.
Reduce 1.4 litres of stock to 900ml in a wide pan, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile blend the reserved roasted vegetables with a ladle of the hot stock into a smooth purée.
Make a roux with the butter and flour, cook 2 minutes, whisk in the hot stock, then stir in the vegetable purée. Simmer for 5 minutes, add the vinegar to stop it tasting flatly sweet, season and serve.
Tips worth knowing
- Two tins, always. Vegetables need space and dry heat to caramelise and they will simply stew if they are piled on top of one another.
- Core older parsnips. The woody centre is bitter and it comes through clearly once you concentrate the stock.
- Holding back a quarter of the roasted veg and blending it in at the end gives you the sweet roasted flavour that four hours of simmering destroys.
- The sherry vinegar is doing real work. Without an acid this gravy tips into tasting like sweet vegetable soup.
Change it up
- Leave out the bones entirely and use a vegetable stock for a vegetarian version, adding a teaspoon of Marmite for savoury depth.
- Add a roasted red pepper to the vegetable tin for a warmer, slightly smoky gravy.
- Swap the celeriac for swede for something more traditionally British and slightly peppery.
Keeping and reheating
Keeps four days in the fridge and four months frozen. The vegetable purée can settle out on standing, so whisk it hard when reheating.
Questions people ask
Can you use roasted vegetables to thicken gravy?
Yes, and it works well. Blended roasted root vegetables give body, colour and sweetness with no flour at all. They do make a slightly opaque, rustic gravy rather than a clear glossy one, so pick the finish you want before you start.
Why roast the bones and vegetables separately?
They need different amounts of space and cook at different rates. Bones can sit close together, vegetables cannot or they steam. Splitting them across two tins takes an extra minute of washing up and noticeably improves the caramelisation.
Which vegetables should not go in stock?
Anything from the brassica family, so cabbage, sprouts and broccoli, which turn sulphurous over a long simmer. Beetroot will dye everything pink, potato makes it cloudy and starchy, and too much fennel or pepper will dominate the whole pot.