BEEF GRAVY

GOOD BEEF GRAVY IS THICK, SMOOTH, RICHLY colored, and beefy tasting. It should be good enough to pour over the meat itself, not just the mashed potatoes. This kind of sauce was long a standard on many Sunday dinner tables. Unfortunately, many cooks have turned to jarred and packages versions, which are pale imitations of the real thing. Our goal was to develop a recipe that was easy to make and produced delicious results.

Our first thought was to follow the model for turkey gravy—make a dark roux, thin it with stock, and then enrich it with pan drippings. Although this sounded like a good idea, it didn't really work. The flavor of the gravy was flat and not terribly beefy.

The problem here was stock. When making turkey gravy, the roux is thinned out with turkey stock made from the neck and giblets. Homemade beef stock is not an option for home cooks when making beef gravy. From previous tastings, we have found that canned beef broth has almost no beef flavor, and we don't recommend it. For instance, when the test kitchen developed a recipe for French onion soup, we found that a combination of canned chicken broth and red wine did a better job than canned beef broth of replicating the meaty flavor of homemade beef stock. Unfortunately, we found that the combination of canned chicken broth and red wine doesn't have enough meaty flavor to work in a quickly simmered gravy.

At this point, we shifted tracks and figured we would start with the drippings and build a gravy in the pan. The process would be similar to making chicken jus, except that we wanted a thickened gravy. There are three common ways to thicken gravy: (1) make a roux with flour and the pan drippings and then add liquid; add liquid to the drippings to make a sauce and then thicken with either (2) cornstarch or a (3) butter-flour paste at the end.

Turning the pan drippings into a roux was problematic. A beef roast produces minimal pan drippings, rarely more than 2 tablespoons. With so little fat, it's hard to make a decent roux. Supplementing the pan drippings with extra fat solved this problem, but the final gravy was muddy and opaque. Worse still, the flavor was not terribly meaty.

Since we decided not to thicken the pan drippings at the outset, we shifted to the gravy itself and decided to test the two remaining thickening options once our gravy testing was complete. We needed to figure out what liquid or liquids could transform pan drippings into a sauce.

Although quickly simmered red wine and chicken broth created a mediocre gravy when added to a dark roux, we knew that they offered our best shot at creating meaty flavor. We started by throwing some onions into the pan drippings. We found that the onions burned because the drippings were so minimal. Adding some red wine with the onions solved this problem.

We continued cooking until the onions were tender and the red wine had reduced by half. At this point, we added chicken broth. Our first gravy made this way was good but still too bland. It was clear that the broth needed to reduce more. In the end, we found it necessary to reduce the chicken broth by half. Gravy made with this way tasted rich and meaty. We found that the long simmering time breaks down the browned bits in the pan better, so they release their concentrated flavor into the gravy. The individual components have more time to blend, and the result is a more complex gravy.

Despite the long simmering time, our gravy was too thin. Having already ruled out the roux, we tested the two most common methods for thickening a completed sauce: a cornstarch slurry and a beurre manié (or butter-flour paste).

The beurre manié (made by working 2 tablespoons flour into 2 tablespoons softened butter) gave the gravy a slightly thicker texture, but the butter competed with the meat flavor. The cornstarch-thickened sauce was definitely beefier. In addition, the slightly lighter texture of the cornstarch-thickened sauce was a better match for thin slices of beef. Cornstarch also gave the gravy a better sheen.

In the end, the simplest gravy proved to be the best. The key is to make sure to reduce the wine and chicken broth sufficiently to concentrate their flavors and to dissolve fully the browned bits left in the roasting pan.