Student Budget Gravy

Value range flour, value range stock cubes, an onion and a bit of oil. That is the entire shopping list, and the whole lot costs less than a single sachet of instant sauce. The reason it works is technique rather than ingredients, browning the onion properly and cooking the flour out, which costs nothing but ten minutes of your attention.

Ingredients

Makes about 450ml, enough for four plates

• 1 onion the loose ones are cheaper than the netted bags if you only need one
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp (25g) plain flour
• 2 stock cubes value range is fine, they are saltier so taste as you go
• 500ml (18fl oz) hot water about two mugs
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp vinegar malt, white or whatever is in the cupboard
• black pepper to taste

Kit

• Saucepan
• Wooden spoon
• Fork or whisk
• Mug for measuring

Method

1. Slice the onion as thinly as you can be bothered to. Thinner slices brown faster, which saves gas or electricity as well as time.

2. Heat the oil in a saucepan over a medium heat and add the onion with the sugar and a pinch of salt. The sugar is not there to sweeten it, it is there to speed up the browning, which is the most expensive thing in this recipe in terms of time.

3. Fry for eight to ten minutes, stirring every minute or so. Push it well past golden until there are properly brown, almost sticky edges. If it starts catching, add a tablespoon of water and scrape, then carry on.

4. Crumble in the stock cubes and stir them straight into the hot onions for twenty seconds. Frying a stock cube briefly in fat makes it taste noticeably less like a stock cube.

5. Add the flour and stir it through. It will be a dry, lumpy looking mess, which is fine. Cook it for a minute.

6. Add the hot water a mugful at a time, stirring or whisking hard after each. Use a fork if you have no whisk, it works nearly as well against the side of the pan.

7. Simmer for five minutes, stirring now and then. It thickens and darkens as it goes and the onions collapse into it.

8. Take it off the heat, add the vinegar and plenty of pepper, and taste. Cheap cubes are salty, so it will almost certainly not need salt. If it tastes harsh, another quarter teaspoon of sugar rounds it off.

Tips worth knowing

• The sugar and the vinegar are the two cheapest upgrades in cooking. Sugar speeds the browning and softens the edges, vinegar at the end makes everything taste more defined.
• Value range flour behaves the same as branded in a gravy. The difference in a roux is nil, so do not spend the extra.
• If you have a bit of bacon, a sausage end or a scrap of cheese rind, fry it with the onion and take it out before serving. It costs nothing extra and adds a lot.
• Make double and freeze half in a clean takeaway tub. Reheated gravy on a night when you cannot face cooking is worth more than the ten minutes it took.

Keeping and reheating

Four days in the fridge in a covered tub, three months in the freezer. Freeze it in portions if you can, since reheating the whole lot and refreezing it is not a good idea.

Questions people ask