Rao’s, Broth, Gravy and Higher End Grocery?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Through a mix of marketing, reputation and simple quality ingredients, Rao’s has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of pasta sauce, then Savos was bought out by Campbells for $2.7B

It’s not hard to make great sauce. Under the right conditions, it’s not hard to make great stock or delicious gravy either. You can buy bouillon, broth or gravy at any store, often cheaply. But it is usually mainly salt and MSG, the texture of the real thing without much substance. The ingredient list looks literally nothing like the home version.

Does any place sell delicious gravy, good as homemade? People say the old KFC gravy recipe was “ambrosia” but replaced with industrial cardboard flavours. Does any fast food place or chain restaurant do gravy well? Are there any grocery stores who sell a quality product you really like?

2

Hmmm? :thinking:.
I’m gonna say no.

It’s trivially easy to make. Practice, practice, practice. The ingredients are cheap.

(Cracker barrel does a good white gravy, tho’)

3

I’m with Beck on this. It’s very easy to make a good gravy. But it’s not easy for that gravy, with it’s simple ingredients, to remain shelf stable in a jar.

Rao’s is a brand I don’t care for. I prefer to make my own pasta sauce. I have been known to boost it with a store-bought, organic, sauce if I didn’t make enough to last me the whole year. By mixing my own with the retail brand, I make the retail brand taste better, IMO, and make mine last longer.

I do buy broth/stock because, living alone, I don’t cook whole chickens or buy rotisserie chickens. I did, but I felt I was wasting money as I would only eat half before I had to toss the rest. And I usually don’t have a whole day to let it cook down as I’m still sort-of working for a living. But I agree that homemade broth/stock usually tastes better.

4

I haven’t really tried to store gravy. But it’s hard to believe with all the food industry wizardry and knowledge that it can’t be done.

5

My short version, they are mostly crap with added ingredients. Sugar, msg, salt is way over the top.

Homestyle brand is absolutely disgusting.

6

I’m sure it could be done. But can it be done at anything other than boutique scale and pricing? That I doubt. It’s like the old saw about most things, you can get stuff that’s high quality, you can get stuff quickly (or long lasting), and you can get stuff cheaply. Getting all three is a feat worthy of the gods!

I’ll use a concrete example. I have, on occasion, made duck confit at home. It was… pretty cheap, I bought two frozen ducklings from the Asian market, at around $2.99/lb (pre-COVID, I think it’s 3.99 or more a pound last I checked), made confit with the legs and most of the fat, and ate the rest in various dishes and made incredible stock from the carcass.

If I want it from Williams-Sonoma (not the most expensive, but not the least either), that’s $79.99 for 2 lbs. Sure, it has nothing in it, but duck leg, rendered duck fat, garlic, shallots, salt, sugar, spices.

It’s probably amazing. It’s also $40 per pound, and that’s for a version without canning or other longer term preservation.

Now sure, tomatoes, gravy, and the like tend to be made with much less expensive ingredients! But you also have to factor in the cost of creating all the equipment and personal to make it, to process it, to put it into shelf-stable storage, and ship it around the state / nation / world while making a small / medium / large profit.

And since a lot of those factors can’t be shorted, it’s almost always the ingredients that get the deep cuts early on.

I’ll give a better example. @Beckdawrek says they can make an amazing gravy. If you paid Beck, say $30 + shipping per quart jar, I’m sure she’d make some from scratch, home can it, pack it in dry ice and ship it to you. Probably a few times.

Or, I’d do the same with all the from scratch tomato sauce I made with my MIL’s tomatoes (bushels worth, while reduced quite a lot).

But if you needed enough to supply more than just yourself, we’d have to get help, equipment and all the other trappings to keep up with demand. And very quickly, the people who manage all of -that- start running the business, rather than the cooks and chefs that -may- have been involved in the beginning. And they care a whole lot less about anything than growing said business and improving the bottom line.

Dammit, we should go back to getting all our goods from monks working breweries and cheeseworks under a vow of poverty!

7

Hey, I’d do that. Or just come for dinner. Always, gravy is a possiblity.

8

I make my own stocks and broths, freeze them in ice cube trays, and store them in gallon bags in the freezer. I started out with vegetable broth, because all the commercial brands I’ve tried have an off flavor, but then Mr. Legend had to go on a low-sodium diet, so I started doing them all at home. I freeze the extra chicken or beef, too, since we have the same problem with leftovers.

9

In my experience, homemade roux-based gravy gets waaaaaaaaay too thick in the refrigerator and warming it back up won’t help. On Thanksgiving, I make fresh gravy from the turkey drippings for the day of, and buy a jar of gravy for the leftovers.

Looking at a jar of Heinz beef gravy I have in my fridge right now, I see “modified food starch” is the third ingredient after beef stock and water, so I assume that’s doing most of the heavy lifting thickening the stuff as opposed to the flour which is remanded to the “contains less than 2% of” section, along with soy lecithin, which is probably also helping.

10

Every now and then, I get a hankering for French Dip sandwiches. When that happens I do a passable Jus in just a few minutes, by frying up a few slices of roast beef from the deli, along with mirepoix from the freezer, shallots, and then Better Than Bouillon beef concentrate. I add cheap port instead of water, and voila!

I reckon if I added that to a roux it would make good gravy too, but we want it dippable.

The Better Than Bouillon Roasted Garlic flavor has also become a staple in our house. A teaspoon of that goes into just about every flavor of soup I can think of.

I make my own stock any time we have enough veggies and/or chicken carcasses in the freezer. But I’m not above adding a spoonful of that stuff to deepen the flavor. It really is better than bouillon.

11

I can think of a few examples of decent commercial gravy, though not many. The small Longo’s chain has an excellent store-made turkey gravy, jarred and refrigerated. I think they also have a beef gravy but I’ve never tried it. The practical problem with this excellent turkey gravy is that it’s a big jar and, once opened, is only good for a few days.

Pusateri’s also carries store-made turkey gravy but it may be seasonal; I only remember seeing it around Thanksgiving and Christmas. They also have several kinds of store-made frozen broth. I’ve never bought the broth, but hey, it’s Pusateri’s, so you can be reasonably assured that (a) it’s probably excellent, and (b) it’s outrageously expensive!

Moving down from the high-end stuff, the rotisserie chicken place Swiss Chalet has a great tangy dipping sauce, also available in the grocery store in packets in dehydrated form which produces virtually identical results. It has a unique, almost addictive flavour but is really only a good match for rotisserie chicken or mild rotisserie-style wings (or the accompanying fries!).

At risk of revealing myself as an uncultured boor, Knorr brand sauce packets aren’t too bad, either. I’m partial to Knorr hunter sauce myself, especially when reconstituted with a bit of red wine. The ingredients list is a mixed bag of dehydrated natural ingredients, spice powders, salt, and sugars (no MSG) but it’s a skillful blend that produces decent results, IMHO. It serves the purpose on the very rare occasions when I have roast beef or indeed any kind of red meat. Their demi-glace and au jus are OK, too, but I prefer the hunter.

12

Obviously using good ingredients costs more. And you can (it once could) buy a can of chicken gravy for a dollar. You could add some rosemary and garlic, a little cream, some pepper and come up with something better. I really like the idea of roast beef and mirepoix above. Generally, I only want gravy with roasted meat which is an easy time to make it. But fries and sandwiches might work.

The appeal of Swiss Chalet sauce is completely lost on me.

The above recipe made me wonder what the Italian Beef guys do. A quick Google answered that question.

13

Which is what you end up doing if you store leftover gravy in the fridge.

14

Gravy 'n Bread

“On Monday we have bread and gravy
On Tuesday it’s gravy and bread
On Wednesday and Thursday, it’s gravy on toast
But that’s only gravy and bread
On Friday it’s rye bread and gravy
On Saturday it’s whole wheat instead
But Sunday’s a treat, 'cause we never get meat
We just have gravy without any bread!”

15

Whatever that is, it’s not a picture of a Chicago Italian beef. A lot of places here use bouillon cubes and water, or a mix of cooking liquid and bouillon cubes. This is close to what I would consider a “real” Italian Beef recipe:

About the bouillon. I have encountered lively debate on the makeup of the juice as I developed this recipe. Some insist you must use bouillon to be authentic, while others use beef stock, veal stock, or a soup base, and simmer real onions and garlic in it. The bouillon advocates have won me over on the authenticity argument, although I must confess, soup base is my favorite.

Now, I’m pretty sure they don’t all use that, but when I make my own Italian beef at home, some bouillon cubes are involved to get the flavor close to what I know and love from my favorite beef places. Stock cubes are absolutely acceptable in this use, though I also simmer it with some beef broth, garlic, onions, etc.

As for gravy, while nothing beats a proper beef gravy made with brown stock, most of the time, I have a hankering for the salt-and-MSG goodness of regular ol’ packet gravy. Plus it’s so much less labor intensive.

16

What happens if you don’t store the stock/broth ice cubes in a plastic bag but still in the freezer? Does the ice sublimate so you end up with a more concentrated solution?

17

If you want to concentrate it, concentrate it before you freeze it. Glace de viande. Back when I used to have all sorts of energy and free time, I would take a beef or chicken stock and reduce it to about 1/8–1/10 the original amount, freeze it in cubes, and then when I want to use it, reconstitute with whatever the reduction amount was or even use full power as a homemade “Better Than Bouillon.” It is killer for pan sauces, and saves a lot of freezer space.

18

I was wondering if letting the frozen stock sublimate (or freeze-dry, which is essentially what would be happening) would result in something desirable or awful.

19

The times I have left my ice cubes in a bag in the back of a freezer and forgot about them, they seemed to eventually develop a freezer flavor to them, but that’s like after a year. Otherwise, they seemed fine. The amount of extra concentration seemed rather neglible to me, but mine were already concentrated to begin with.

20

I’ve never tried keeping them uncovered, mainly because I don’t want everything in the freezer to smell like stock. I do the reduction before I freeze it. I’ll usually chill the whole batch a bit before freezing it, and this leads to an amusing semi-solidity in the stocks.