In any case, in my family gravy is considered a beverage.
I’m struggling to understand this. After you roast a piece of animal, the bottom of the pan is always going to be at least a little brown in the fat and delicious drippy bits cast off. Even if you don’t cook the roux all the way out, the gravy is always going to be at least a little brown, surely? Mine always is.
Mind you my sister’s gravy is always and unfailingly grey in colour, and tastes disgusting too, so obviously this isn’t as foolproof as I always thought.
Americans tend to make a fair number of gravies with milk/cream and without cooking out the flour for the roux very much.
They also tend to use the term “gravy” very liberally, for most sauces that are served with meat (so you get sausage gravy, turkey gravy, brown gravy, bacon gravy), whereas in the Commonwealth “gravy” tends to refer to the brown kind, made without cream or milk, pretty much regardless of what meat you make it with, but usually refers to roasted meat drippings only.
I’m sure it is a regionalism, but I have heard what I would call sauce called gravy. Spaghetti Sauce is called, at least in parts of PA, gravy or red gravy.
No, no, I understand all that. I love all kinds of gravy - in fact we’re having biscuits and gravy tonight - but this appeared to be asking about meat gravy.
Who above said turkey gravy is brown? Turkey and chicken gravy is yellow unless you deliberately darken it. At least is should be, if you’re making it delicious.
It’s only yellow if you haven’t allowed the flour to brown in the fat. More browning equals deeper color and flavor. Uncooked flour is the biggest failure point in making gravy.
Nope, not true. There’s nothing I hate more than raw flour flavor so I cook my flour. But poultry drippings are no where near as dark as beef or pork drippings. Plus chicken and turkey broth is yellow in color, which makes for a much lighter and yellower gravy.
Turkey and chicken gravy are not brown.
Turkey gravy
That turkey gravy looks anything but yellow to me. It’s just a lighter shade of brown. But then I’m partially colorblind. The beef gravy you linked to looks more like an au jus. By the way, there is nothing untrue in my statement about the flour.
Those are all shades of brown, and I’m not colourblind.
Agree those are all shades of brown. Chicken or turkey gravy isn’t going to really be literally yellow unless you put food coloring in it.
Gary T gave the essential answer to this question. It’s “brown” as opposed to “white” from the addition of dairy.
Yellow chicken gravy comes from a packet, and it’s gross.
And I’m pretty firmly in the “gravy is a beverage” camp. As far as I’m concerned, mashed potatoes are merely the vehicle for transporting gravy to my gaping maw.
I always knew that you were a standup guy.
Those gravies are all shades of brown. Gravy isn’t yellow, bearnaise sauce is yellow.
Quoth Khadaji:
What’s really baffling is that some of them apparently have no conception that gravy could possibly be anything other than spaghetti sauce. I was at a church service once in the Philadelphia area, and the pastor was trying to reassure the congregation about some minor change in the liturgy. He explained that some things were essential, and some things were flexible, using a gravy analogy: “I could ask you all for your gravy recipes, and they’d all of them be different. But every one of them would include tomatoes”.
It’s just brown and water.
Joe
Sauce=Gravy is an Italian thing, not restricted to PA, but I noticed it’s predominance from Philly up to Scranton, and out into Jersey. I don’t think there’s a clear delineation between sauce and gravy anyway.
Right, it doesn’t baffle me that spaghetti sauce might be called gravy. What baffles me is the notion that nothing but spaghetti sauce could conceivably be called gravy.
I think you’re thinking of Wilson’s B-V. If so, it wasn’t cow’s blood. It was just bouillon, basically.
(It makes it brown if it is otherwise unappetizingly pale.)