How to make Perfect Holiday Turkey Gravy Video

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Video Transcript:
Presenter:  
Holiday turkey with holiday gravy, we are making ours from our holiday turkey short stock on the Cooking Everything Outdoors show.
Announcer:  
Gary House with the outdoor cook Cooking Everything Outdoors show, I hope you try this at home.
Presenter:  
So we are making our holiday turkey gravy from our short stock that we’ve prepared with our turkey.
Now what is short stock?
It’s small batches of stock from caramelized bones and mirepoix really cooked in a short period of time and it’s absolutely fantastic for enhancing and improving your gravy when you are making turkey.
If you haven’t seen me do that, check out this clip real fast and you can see how I did it when I made my turkey.
The first thing I did is I preheated it.
It’s right at about 400–excuse me–about 380 degrees, almost 400 degrees.
I have put a roasting pan inside.
I am preheating that up because I need a hot surface because I am going to be caramelizing about almost 2 pounds of chicken pieces and this is basically thighs and some legs and turkey neck that I’ve chopped up into pieces.
I also have my mirepoix which is 1 large carrot, 1 stock of celery– sorry– and 1 large onion that I’ve chopped up and also have 4 tablespoons of olive oil.
What I’m going to be doing is I’m going to be taking this and I’m going to be caramelizing it or caramelizing it in the grill, that’s the first step to making phenomenal gravy.
So let’s get this short stock going.
4 tablespoons of olive oil, almost 2 pounds of cut up chicken pieces.
And our mirepoix.
Let’s get this stirred up real quick.
We’re going to let this roast for several minutes depending on the temperature of your barbecue.
I am going to keep an eye on it.
But we’re browning all of it tenderizing those vegetables.
We’ve been caramelizing our chicken and mirepoix for about 20 minutes now, almost 400 degrees is roughly where it’s been.
You’ve got to see this, it’s beautiful.
So we’re already getting a lot of nice brown bits on the bottom of our roasting pan.
And if you did this in a stainless steel pan, you’d get even more.
But this is where we want.
We don’t want it completely cooked.
But we want the chicken brown so we are starting to release a lot of these flavors.
Now we needed to deglaze this and what I have here is a cup of dry white wine.
And that’s just basically going to help us get a lot of those brown pieces on the bottom of the roasting pan called sucks.
We’re going to get those up.
And that’s going to add even more flavor to our gravy.
Okay.
So I want to get my pieces off to the side here as much as possible.
I have a roasting rack that I am going to be using for my turkey.
I’m going to place that right in the center.
Now I am going to add 4 cups of stock.
This is homemade chicken stock that I’ve made.
You can use the canned stuff if you’d like, but certainly homemade is very easy to make and it tastes really, really good.
And there we go.
That’s going to stop everything from burning now, and going to add a tremendous amount of flavor to this.
Now that should give you a good idea of how to prepare your short stock when you are cooking a turkey or even a chicken or a roast or anything else you want to make gravy out of.
So what I did was I took everything that was in that pan except for the largest of the chunks, and I set it in just a container that I had and I’ve put this in the refrigerator.
And what this does is it allows the fat to separate from the stock making it easy to remove.
And if you don’t have time for that and you want to make your turkey right away, then you’re just going to have to take a spoon and skim it off your short stock while it’s still hot.
That works perfectly fine.
This is just going to make it a little bit easier.
So the first thing we’re going to do is I am going to skim off the fat.
We need to skim off the fat, just take a spoon and very gently get in there and break that and then you can just lift the fat right off.
You’ll get some of the stock which is gelatinized right now which is absolutely okay.
We’re going to actually use this fat to make our roux which is going to be the basis for our turkey gravy.
Really you can’t make good gravy without a roux and you may not have known that that’s what it was called.
But it is what it is.
Okay.
Now my short stock is separated from my fat and what I need to do real quick is warm this up because we need to go in and we’re going to strain this and get all the large chunks and pieces out and that’s only going to take us a second.
So I’ve taken it and heated up my stock to get it into a liquid form and we’re going to strain it.
Now for those of you that have made short stock before and you’re probably be asking yourself why didn’t Gary strain it first?
Well, the most elaborate and technical answer I can give to you is I didn’t.
It is what it is.
If you make this, I recommend straining it first and then putting it in a refrigerator to solidify the fat, but this also gives you in good light an idea of how to strain it.
Typically you would take it and pour it through a chinois which is a very fine meshed funnel to get the large pieces out, but I wanted to show you you could just use a regular strainer basket and a ball to do that.
It doesn’t remove the largest of pieces, but it certainly does a good job.
And we should get probably 4, perhaps 5 cups of short stock out of this.
And ideally that’s what we are looking for 6 cups would be perfect.
But you can see the large pieces that are filtered out of this and I have some beautiful stock left over which we’re going to make our holiday turkey gravy.
So, now we have our fat and we have our stock.
We’re going to make a roux next.
In order to do that, we’re going to need about 3/4 of a cup of this fat.
In order to make roux you have to have a fat because that’s what mixes with flour.
And what’s what we’re going to make our base for our gravy.
And then we’re going to add our stock to that process.
I’m going to do it all on the grill.
I’m using again the Bull 4 burner stainless steel propane grill which is absolutely fantastic and we’re going to preheat our pan.
A couple of thoughts on that, if you have a side burner that really makes a big difference it’s much easier to use, but I am going to be using 2 burners.
I’m going to turn up the heat on high.
My recommendation would be to do it on the 2 side burners so that your hands is not directly over the flame.
I’m going to probably do mine in the middle because I need to give you the best view that’s possible.
So that’s what we’re going to do, I’m preheating my grill and get my pan preheated.
We’re going to start making roux.
Let’s take about 3/4 of a cup of the fat and we’re going to start heating that up.
It’s going to have some stock added to it already, but it’s not going to be a big, big deal.
Just try not to burn everything.
Let’s get this melted and really hot.
That is really hot.
Now I am going to be using one cup of all-purpose flour, plus a couple extra tablespoons and I’m going to be adding this into the fat constantly stirring to make our roux.
I like to add a little bit at a time so that I don’t run into any big lumps.
And if you’ve made gravy before, you’re familiar with this process.
Now once you get the roux and the fat blended together.
We got a little bit more flour here.
The longer you cook it, the darker it will become.
Let me continue mixing this together and show you what’s next.
So I have my roux about where I want it.
Some professional chefs they like to make a thick dry pasty roux and this is about half way between a thick dry pasty roux and a runny roux, which is what your personal preference maybe.
It’s entirely up to you.
But this works really good for me.
Now it’s right about the right color that I am looking for.
Any more than this, it would be a dark roux and I would start losing the thickening capabilities of the flour and the fat, so I want to stop here.
Now this is where I want to start adding my stock.
I’m going to add just a ladle at a time.
And it’s probably– let’s see if we can get away with doing this here, so what I like to do is I like to add it to the pan to get it little warm before I start incorporating it in.
And then we’re just going to work this first amount in here, start loosening all of this, working our lumps out and start making our gravy.
You can see that it’s smoothing out as we go.
Add some more stock in there.
It’s as simple as that.
So I’m going to continue to be adding stock, constantly stirring to make our turkey gravy, then we’re going to do some taste test I think.
So, at this point I’ve incorporated probably 3 or 4 cups of stock in there.
I’ve switched to whisk and you can see that I’m kind of at a mid-point here where it’s still fairly thick, I’m still incorporating.
And that’s what you want to do, you just constantly stirring to blend this altogether.
And you can see that there’s no lumps in here, there’s some parts that are still kind of thick and that’s working in.
But I’m going to have a huge batch of just incredible gravy in here.
And as you just take your time working this gravy, enjoying the outdoors, it just starts coming together.
Now if you like it real thick like that, you can stop here.
You can add some more stock.
Now just do a ladle at a time, work it in.
I seriously highly recommend saving some of this for some juice, because I’ll tell you what, pour this over a nice turkey sandwich and that’s to die for.
It’s really, really good.
We’re at the point where I really like the thickness of the gravy, but we still have some short stock and really need to do some tasting to make sure that we’re really where we want to be on this.
So let’s do that really quick and yeah, you can see that it’s such just a beautiful gravy.
Wow.
Wonderful, wonderful flavor.
It tastes a little pasty still.
So we’re going to continue to stir it and that taste will actually break out of the gravy the longer you cook it.
And I don’t anticipate adding any more than one more ladle of stock because I don’t want my gravy too thick.
I do want to add some pepper to this.
I think it’s plenty salty.
About a good full teaspoon there I think is going to be just about right.
And another ladle of short stock.
And we’ll just work this a little bit longer until I have the paste taste out and the gravy taste in.
Hi Jove, I think we’re done.
I have the right thickness that I am looking for.
Certainly I have the, wow, the taste profile that I want and it is so rich, robust.
It just has these intense flavors to this turkey gravy.
Not like you would get if you were to buy it in a package at the grocery store and stir some water in there, yuck or open up a jar or a can.
At this point where it’s absolutely completely done took me maybe 20 minutes to get to this point.
And then you can salt and pepper it to however you would like, but I really think that you’ll find that using short stock with your turkey or your chicken or whatever you’re cooking makes a magnificent gravy that is incredibly easy to cook outdoors on a beautiful day.
What a win.
Okay, I want to tell you a few things about some of the stuff that I use real quick.
This barbecue is from Bull BBQ.
It’s a 4 burner stainless steel propane grill with a rotisserie burner attached to it.
This wonderful pan that I am using on the grill is from Manpans.
I just want to give a shout out to them and thank them for letting me use their equipment.
I want to say thank you to my sponsors, Camp Chef and www.OutdoorCooking.com, and the Island Grillstone.
You can find Cooking Everything Outdoors show on YouTube now under the Tastemade banner.
I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, perhaps Google+ soon and oh, iTunes, did I say that?
So I’m everywhere.
Listen, stop by say hi, leave a comment, like the video, give me some plugs, give me some pluses.
If you have a website, take the video and put it on your website and share with the world, I would love it.
And by all means let me know what you want to see next because I’m going to keep on cooking.
This is Gary House with Cooking Everything Outdoors.

 

How to make Perfect Holiday Turkey Gravy