I grew up eating a roast dinner every Sunday. There were varying proteins—my favourite being chicken—along with roast potatoes, sometimes stuffing or Yorkshire puddings, and a selection of vegetables. Tying this all together was gravy. Until I started cooking roast dinners for my family, I never realised how key the gravy actually was to really bringing the meal alive.

Typically, the base of a gravy starts with pan drippings from whatever protein you were roasting. After adding some flour and stock and reducing the liquid, you’ll hopefully have a tasty gravy. Roasting an entire chicken in Finland wasn’t the most straightforward task, as whole chickens are hard to come by at a size large enough to feed five. Instead, I just bought a packet of chicken breasts and roasted those. The problem is, you don’t get a lot of pan drippings from them.

Dumb luck

Along with the chicken, I added some onion, carrots and lemon slices, just as one might put in a roasting tin when doing a whole chicken. Once the chicken was ready, I’d add my stock and flour mix to the pan to pick up the flavour. I quickly streamlined the tin additions to just the lemon. I found the best flavour came when those lemon slices caught the bottom of the pan and caramelised.

The end

For a while, I managed to produce some reasonable gravy from this. But then I made a mistake—I bought a new non-stick roasting tray. After that, I could never manage to get my lemon slices to catch and caramelise. The gravy became cornflour stock; it was not pleasant. I tried and tried to get that flavour back, but the line of thinking I was on was not yielding any results. I was just about done with cooking roasts altogether.

The obvious

During the Christmas holidays, my mother was visiting and she pointed out the glaringly obvious: find a recipe for a vegetarian gravy. It made perfect sense; I really don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that myself.

Supercharged gravy

Mum found a recipe for vegetarian gravy on the BBC Good Food website. The first time I made it was whilst doing a roast, which was a bit of a stretch time-wise. In future, I will make it in batches and freeze them. Despite that, it tasted amazing. There was a real depth of flavour to it and a lovely deep rich colour—it was the best gravy I had ever made.

I made a few adjustments to the recipe: I used gluten-free flour; instead of Marmite, I used nutritional yeast; and I used 1.5 litres of stock so I was left with a generous amount of gravy. Below is the updated recipe—I very much recommend it!

Vegetarian gravy

• Ingredients
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, finely diced
• 1 thyme sprig, large
• 1 knob of butter, large
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 3 tbsp gluten-free flour
• 1 tsp nutritional yeast
• 1 tbsp tomato purée
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1.5 litres of gluten-free vegetable stock
• Soy sauce, to taste

Method

1. Fry the veg and herbs in the butter for 10–12 mins until the vegetables start to brown. Scatter over the sugar and continue to cook until sticky and caramelised. (Don’t be shy with pushing the caramelisation here—that’s where the flavour is!)

2. Stir in the flour until it looks sandy, then add the nutritional yeast, tomato purée, and vinegar. Pour over the stock, then simmer everything together until you have a thickened sauce.

3. Sieve the mixture, then add soy sauce to season and colour. Use straight away, or allow to cool and freeze for later. (Don’t skip the soy sauce; the gravy benefits from the saltiness, which perfectly balances the sweetness.)