Ulster Fry Gravy

An Ulster fry is bacon, sausage, egg, black and white pudding, soda farl and potato bread, all cooked in the same pan. What is left in that pan afterwards is far too good to wash away. This turns it into a gravy in about eight minutes, and it is what makes the fried bread worth eating. It is a Northern Ireland breakfast and it does not pretend to be light.

Ingredients

Makes about 350ml, enough for four plates

• 3 tbsp fat and residue from the fry pan bacon, sausage and pudding fat mixed
• 1 small onion chopped finely
• 1½ tbsp (25g) plain flour
• 450ml (16fl oz) beef or chicken stock hot
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• ½ tsp English mustard
• 1 tsp brown sauce optional, and very much in keeping
• black pepper

Kit

• The frying pan you cooked the fry in
• Whisk

Method

1. Once everything is out of the pan and keeping warm, look at what is left. You want about 3 tablespoons of fat and all the browned bits stuck to the base. Pour off anything over that.

2. Put the pan back over a medium heat and fry the onion in the fat for 5 minutes until soft and picking up colour, scraping the base as you go. The residue lifts as the onion releases moisture.

3. Stir in the flour and cook for 90 seconds. It will look like a dark paste flecked with bits, which is exactly right.

4. Pour in a ladle of hot stock and whisk hard. It will thicken instantly and look lumpy, then smooth out as you work it. Add the rest in two goes, whisking each time.

5. Simmer for 3 to 4 minutes until it coats a spoon. It will be darker than most gravies because of the black pudding residue, and that is the point.

6. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, mustard and brown sauce if using. Taste before adding any salt at all, because bacon fat is very salty and it will usually need none.

7. Grind in plenty of black pepper and pour it straight over the potato bread and soda farl while everything is still hot.

Tips worth knowing

• Cook the fry in the right order and the pan fat gets better as it goes: bacon first, then sausage, then puddings, then the breads in what is left.
• Do not wash the pan between the fry and the gravy, obviously, but do scrape out anything actually burnt and black. Burnt residue makes bitter gravy.
• If your pan is too small to hold the gravy comfortably, scrape everything into a saucepan with a splash of stock. You will lose nothing.
• No salt until the very end. Between bacon, sausage and stock this is one of the easiest gravies in the world to oversalt.

Keeping and reheating

Best made and eaten straight away. It will keep 2 days in the fridge but the flavour is very much of the moment. Reheat in a pan with a splash of water rather than in the microwave, which makes the fat separate.

Questions people ask