OT: Homemade Gravy or Gravy from a Jar

nice humble brag

Always from scratch. I usually braise a roast covered up, anyways, then just reduce and thicken the sauce while the meat rests.

Down south, the art of making gravy is damn near a sacred ritual.

I hear the key is using grandma's 110 year old cast iron skillet.  And her wooden spoon from 1929.

Pro tip -- don't try debate a southern cook about deviled eggs.  It's a no-go zone.

I miss football!

I am calling BS that you are an excellent cook. An excellent cook can make a gravy that blows anything in a jar out of the water.

I sometimes combine methods to make sure I have enough gravy for days of ROI. No matter how great scratch gravy is, depending on how much natural juice rendered from your cooking yields, for my taste, it's not enough. This is especially true of fowl. So, I dump all the juice (fat and all) in packet(s)-made or jar gravy when I need to and adjust with cornstarch and salt/pepper/herbs to make sure I have cups for posterity. 

That said, 90% time, it's scratch gravy made with cornstarch tempered with hot liquid before adding and Kitchen Basics stock or some other high quality meat base. Adding and mixing hot liquid to your thickener before dropping in the a sauce pan keeps the lumps at bay. Thing is, gravy really is a trial and error endeavor...This is an entirely appropriate thread for MGo. All the finest things are discussed here...Go Blue!

We are "from scratch" people. I am a Yoder and my wife is a Kauffman...here, our Amish and Mennonite heritage serves us very well. We have a large garden, many fruit trees and raise our own poultry, lamb and beef. We buy the fruits and vegetables we do not/cannot produce ourselves in quantity from orchards and family "truck farmers"...and can and freeze. We have two large freezers and a large pantry for our home-processed food stocks. We make all our own tomato products-juice, pizza sauce spaghetti sauce, salsa and ketchup. In my retirement I bake pies and breads-among other things for a large local retirement facility...just for the fun of it. I make the gravy :)

We eat better than royalty. 

We need a WOT -Way Off Topic category.  OMG, next we’ll be doing an OT on Megan Markle’s delivery date and baby stats.... TGFMBB to keep some assemblence of all things Blue.

I suppose if all you are eating is a giant plate of mashed potatoes, jar or packet gravy would be an acceptable practice. 

And THEN there's gravy on spaghetti.

Don't shoot me! Zehnder's powdered gravy is....really good.  

https://www.zehndersstore.com/product/zehnders-chicken-gravy-mix/

I was shocked and we use it often.  Try it before shooting me.

Only have to add water, incredibly easy and tasty.

Whatever mama makes for me gets the papal blessing

I prefer Crystal clear Gravy!

I crafted a snappy, insightful, clever UM Peach Bowl post (my first) for this board not too long ago and for reasons unknown to me it was taken down after about an hour.  And now we have a post about gravy?  What does gravy have to do with the price of tea in China or the fortunes of UM sports teams?  I'm changing my account to something like Putingrad or West German Speed skater with the hope it will improve my chances . . . maybe MineralRoyalty.

I prefer to make it, but on occasion I will use a jar or package of powder.  Most times I will procure a rotisserie chicken from the local Food Lion - because they are f'in GOOD (better than I can ever roast)!!  And for these, I will use pre-packaged gravy and add the juices from the chicken package into it to help the flavor.

I always make a broth out of the chicken/turkey carcass for soups.  Put every bit of carcass scrap into a pot (bones, fat chunks, skin you don't eat - everything), cover it with water, season as you like, at let it cook.  Bring it to a boil, then back off the heat and let it simmer for many hours.  Strain it out and you have a soup base that beats the crap out of anything else you'll find.  You can freeze it for later use in soups or gravies...

I make gravy from scratch.  It doesn't reheat perfectly, but it is way better the first time.  Some questions/thoughts...

1.  You said pasty, which makes me think you use flour as the thickener.  Is that true?  I find corn starch slurry works better in terms of consistency.  The flavor of a flour roux can be lost a bit using corn starch, but I've found it helps with texture.

2.  Mine isn't ever oleaginous, but I usually remove some of the fat oils using either a baster or a separator.  It definitely depends on the meat.  You'll need some fat, but too much is too much.

3.  Also, once it is done, I add a pat or two of butter.  It helps smooth and homogenize the consistency.  

No one's responded to my post about gravy on spaghetti. Was I the last to learn that many people in the East call spaghetti sauce "gravy"?

What are we calling gravy? The eye-talians have a pretty different idea of it don't they?

Now this is a great OT thread. 

Homemade is a million times better than jar so homemade whenever possible.  Even if you don't have a lot of drippings/juice to work with, whatever you have plus butter, stock and thickener is going to be better than whatever Heinz concocted.

I realize I am late to this party but this is actually something I know how to do well.  SInce most of it has already been covered I will just add a few things:

1) gravy from a jar is a hard pass

2) like many others have said, start with a roux. (Technique is important, but I'll bet you can youtube it...)

3) Use Wondra (it's flour that is ground extra fine)  It's the secret to smooth, unlumpy gracy.

Jar gravy can be good tbh, but homemade gravy is always better. Cook some bacon, add flour then stock and milk.

Oleaginous?  (Great word BTW!)  Refrigerate your reduced stock and take off the fat cap. A good stock, and the resultant gravy, should have plenty of collagen but not be fatty. 

Lumpy?  Incorporate the stock into your roux slower and whisk more.

Pasty? Either you need to revisit proportions of stock to roux or you're not cooking the roux long enough.

I'm the only thing in my kitchen that's fatty, lumpy and pasty.