The ginger one's designated task was to chop lots and lots onions
So… replicating the flavour of my mum’s and Waitrose’s delicious gravy is pretty hard it turns out. Marginally tired but not hungover from the weekend’s events last Sunday, I thought it would be as simple as bunging in some vegetable stock, chopped onions and cornflour together but alas, making the perfect onion gravy is not that simple you know. When I started to cook I rang my mum asking her advice. She helpfully informed me I needed some form of lard and perhaps some meat bones to create my own stock from. Whatever. Clearly have not got these ingredients, I thought to myself, but I’m sure I can rustle something up. I started by making my flame-haired flatmate chop up lots of onions. I have very delicate eyes you see, and as a result am rendered blubbering as soon as the knife hits the onion skin. The ginger one sliced them into much more delicate slices than I would have ever been able to produce and I started frying them gently on some olive oil.
Then came the base for my gravy. Yes you guessed it, Bisto. Probably the most complex part of my onion gravy making process, I mixed together lots of Bisto granules (vegetable flavour) and hot water. Then I mixed up some cornflour with some water and added this to the stock and onions to make it nice and thick. I then chucked in a bit of ketchup, Worcester sauce, marmite, pepper (the condiment, not vegetable), some beef gravy granules, and some Cornish Sea Salt (onion flavour, this stuff is incredible – blog post to follow on this).
The sausages weren't as stumpy as they looked
And do you know what? The result wasn’t all that bad. We poured it over our mountains of sausage and mash and it tasted pretty damn good. The onions gave the gravy a nice texture and added some bite to it. I felt it really could have benefited from something else, although I wasn’t sure what. It needed some depth of flavour that I couldn’t seem to get from the ingredients I had to hand. After reading other blog posts on making onion gravy (see Food Glorious Food and Our New Life in the Country,) next time I will try out splashing in some red wine. I also think it would have had that ‘depth’ to it if I had made my own stock – everyone knows mums are always right.
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