Gravy, glace de viande, literally translated meat ice, is a high level concentrated meat sauce. You can make this easily, you can freeze it and store for a long period. You can co-mix it with de-glazed pan juices to make delicious other sauces and dishes.
Often one makes a meat sauce under high pressure: Will the meat taste well? Are the other dishes ready? And when the gravy uses pan drippings, often first we need to separate some fat or make a smooth roux.
All the while many professional chefs do want to make us believe that there is no need for stress….. We propose here to go back to what French chefs did for centuries: make a good broth well in advance, and concentrate this broth to make it the star of the dinner.
Sure you can add still some of the meat juices of the meat that is resting or even mix in some fat, some de-glazed pan drippings even, but there is no need. Your excellent gravy will be there and is fail safe.
This post will offer a fail safe method to make deluxe gravy from a variety of meats, provide some tips and discuss the advantages of this method. All your guests will appreciate this too.
The art of making gravy, glace de viande
Making gravy from the pan scrapings of fried meat, is a fine method, but is more suited for the intense flavor of beef and perhaps lamb. It is already less suitable for pork, not to speak of duck or chicken. Moreover, all the fat rendered during frying, unless separated before, will also end up in the gravy. The starch emulsifies the fat and thickens the sauce. While the fat may contain flavor, in the modern world we may not want to have all that animal fat in the gravy.
Also in this way we can only make the gravy last after the meat has left the pan. This puts extra pressure on the chef.
It is far better, much more tasty and ending up with much reduced fat by making the gravy from other sources of the same meat type. You can do this days or even weeks before. For this purpose we first make a broth of the particular meat source, beef, pork, duck or chicken. We often can use much cheaper pieces of meat with bones. After the broth is made, the meat pieces can serve well to make a ragout from, or a terrine. Discard the bones or re-use again for a new batch. Do not season the broth. Particularly be careful with salt and things as celery, or herbs.
After an overnight cool down period we remove most of the fat on top. Then concentrate the broth. This will amplify the taste of all ingredients.
Special equipment
a fine sieve
Ingredients
Method
- rinse the bones and the meat with cold water and dry them
- in a large stock pan, add a tbsp of the oil and brown the meat and bones on medium fire,
- turn them regularly and after some 10-15 min add the onions and carrot, roughly cut
- after another 10 minutes add 4 L of cold water and bring the mixture slowly to a boil; Keep the lid off
- Skim froth from the surface when the temperature gets closer to the boiling point;
- Adjust the heat so that the liquid is very slowly simmering. Add some thyme. Then add the lid back on and check after some minutes if the heat needs to be tempered more
- After 12 hours, place the broth in a cool environment over night
- The next day, skim off any fat that has formed
- Then remove bones and meat and filter the broth through a fine mesh
- Heat the broth at high, so that the evaporation goes vigorously, but not so high that the foam boils over
- When the volume has reduced by half, add 1 tsp of sherry vinegar
- Continue concentrating the broth and add the last 1/2 to 1 tsp sherry vinegar when roughly 20% of the broth is left over
- Then temper the heat source and when the foam bubbles become very tiny and the liquid becomes more viscous, stop the heat
- Taste for saltiness and add salt as needed
- You can keep the glace de viande in the fridge for several days or freeze it (in cubes ). If you wanted to stop the concentration process earlier , you have to bond it with some starch solution
Notes
Food allergy & intolerance information: none
Remarks
1.For beef gravy, I use half meat bones and the other half are cheap pieces of meat like flank steak. Frying the bones and meat at low fire will brown them and provide more taste to the broth through the Maillard reaction. Add here some aromatics, such as onion, some garlic, carrots and a little bit of celery and parsley. The bones will mainly contribute collagen, that converts into gelatin and gives the broth body and also minerals such as potassium and phosphorous. For the rest most of the taste has to come from the meat in the form of amino acids, among which glutamine is well know to contribute umami taste.
2. For pork gravy use pork bones with some pork meat on it and use a day to extract flavor. Tonkatsu ramen broth is made by extracting pork bones for days.
3. Bird gravy: For duck and chicken, I use the carcass of a whole bird, or alternatively several legs. The feet, devoured by Chinese, and often not easily available elsewhere, are great contributors to broth gelatine, which will help to thicken the gravy toward the end of the evaporation process. The recipe to make duck glace has been posted earlier. Chicken or turkey follow the same basic instructions.
For the nerds
1. One tip that works well when making beef, duck and lamb gravy this way: add half way the concentration a tea spoon or two of a nicely aged vinegar. Sherry vinegar preferred but also balsamic vinegar works well. As the acetic acid in the vinegar boils at a slightly lower temperature than the water, the acidity boils off and the remaining taste residues compliment the taste of the concentrated broth.
2. Stop the concentration when the fluid starts to foam more and has thickened somewhat. If you feel you need, you can still thicken the gravy with a little bit of starch, emulsified in some water.
3. The concentrated broth contains lots of gelatine, that has been formed from the extracted collagen from the bones and it will also contain lots of amino acids, some of which give this very umami taste. The concentration of amino acids in the glace de viande, could reach 20 % by weight. The gelatine level could be even higher. This will cause the sauce to solidify upon cooling and give this pleasant sticky taste. The sauce is full of a deep meat taste and it is very suitable to mix with other sauces to give them taste and body. The sauce can be frozen for months or stored in the fridge for a few days.
