How to get lumps out of gravy (and fix thin gravy)

Why is my gravy lumpy?

Because the starch reached hot liquid in clumps. Starch granules swell and turn to gel fast in hot liquid, so the outside of a clump of flour sets into a skin while the powder inside stays dry. Simmering won't break it up. Cut one open and you'll find raw flour in the middle. The Culinary Institute of America says it plainly: a starch added straight to a hot liquid clumps and ruins the texture of the sauce.

Both standard gravy methods exist to keep the granules apart before they get hot and wet. A roux coats them in fat: flour stirred into melted drippings or butter. A slurry suspends them in cold liquid. Most lumpy gravy comes from skipping or rushing one of those steps:

• Flour sprinkled into simmering drippings, with no roux first.
• All the broth poured into the roux at once. Mississippi State University Extension's turkey gravy adds it slowly, stirring the whole time.
• A slurry mixed with warm stock from the pot, so it lumps in the cup before it reaches the gravy.
• Extra flour shaken in at the end to thicken, dry.

How to get lumps out of gravy: whisk, strain or blend

Start with a whisk, because it costs you nothing. Turn the heat to low and whisk hard for a full minute, getting into the corners of the pan where lumps hide. Soft lumps, the kind that squash against the side of the pan, break up this way. Firm ones won't.

To strain, set a fine-mesh sieve over a clean pan or a heatproof jug and pour the gravy through. Stir it in the sieve with a spoon to help the liquid through, but don't press the lumps: push hard and you force half-gelled flour through the mesh and get small lumps back. Scrape the smooth gravy off the underside of the sieve.

An immersion blender is faster and keeps everything. Tilt the pan so the head stays under the surface, or you'll paint the stove. With a countertop blender, fill the jar no more than half full and hold the lid down with a folded towel, because hot liquid pushes the lid up when the motor starts.

Whichever you use, bring the gravy back to a simmer for 2 or 3 minutes afterward. Breaking a lump frees the raw flour that was inside it, and that flour needs a few minutes of heat to thicken and lose its pasty taste.

How to thicken thin gravy with a slurry

Whisk cornstarch into cold water until it looks like milk, stir it into the simmering gravy, and let it boil for 1 minute. Those are the steps Bob's Red Mill gives for its cornstarch, which has twice the thickening power of flour, so you need half as much.

The CIA's starting point is 1 tablespoon of starch to 2 tablespoons of cold water. Pour in half, stirring, bring it back to a boil and look at it on a spoon before you add the rest. Gravy thickens more as it cools on the plate, so stop a little short of where you want it.

The amounts per cup are University of Illinois Extension's for thickening a liquid from nothing. Thin gravy already has some starch in it, so it usually needs less, which is why the slurry goes in by halves. Cornstarch is pure starch and sets clear, while flour carries gluten along with its starch and sets cloudy, so match the thickener the gravy started with.

Simmering it down works when you have 10 minutes and the gravy tastes weak as well as thin. It concentrates the flavor and the salt, so taste it before you reach for the salt shaker.

How to fix greasy gravy

Take it off the heat, leave it alone for 3 or 4 minutes so the fat floats to the top, then tilt the pan and spoon the fat off. A wide, shallow spoon or a ladle skimmed along the surface gets most of it.

A pool of fat on the gravy means there was more fat than the flour could hold. Mississippi State's recipe uses 2 tablespoons of fat to 3 tablespoons of flour for 1½ cups of broth, a little more flour than fat. A roasting pan from a big turkey can hold far more fat than that, and stirring all of it into a roux with a few spoonfuls of flour leaves the extra loose in the gravy.

Next time, separate the drippings before you start. Pour them into a fat separator, a jug with its spout coming from the bottom, wait a few minutes, and pour the juices out from under the fat. No separator: let them settle in a tall glass and spoon the fat off. Keep only the fat the roux needs.

How to fix salty gravy

Thin it with unsalted liquid and thicken it back up. Whisk in water or unsalted broth half a cup at a time, tasting after each one, then bring back the body with a cornstarch slurry. The salt is dissolved in the gravy, so the only way to make each spoonful less salty is to put more unsalted gravy around it.

Salty gravy usually starts before the gravy does:

• Drippings from a brined turkey. A wet or dry brine salts the meat, and some of that salt runs into the pan. Our post on dry brine vs wet brine covers how much goes in.
• Regular boxed broth. Mississippi State's recipe calls for low-sodium broth and adds its own ¼ teaspoon of salt, so you decide how salty it gets.
• Salting early, then simmering the gravy down by a third.

So salt last. Make the gravy, thicken it, then taste it on a forkful of turkey and mashed potato, which are what it'll be eaten with, and salt it then.

How to keep gravy smooth (and hold it until dinner)

Warm the broth before it goes into the roux, add it a ladle at a time, and whisk until each ladle disappears before adding the next. Cook the flour in the fat until it bubbles, as Mississippi State's method has it, and simmer the finished gravy 5 to 10 minutes over low heat so the flour loses its raw taste.

Or make it the day before. Our post on gravy without drippings covers a make-ahead gravy from turkey wings, and you can whisk the day's drippings into it while it reheats.

Cold gravy sets into a jelly, from the starch and the gelatin in the drippings. It's fine. Whisk it as it heats and it turns back into gravy, with a splash of broth if it's thick.

In Hedgehog Chef, Cook a meal takes the recipes for dinner and a serve time, and schedules every step backwards from it, so the gravy goes on while the turkey rests and is done before anyone picks up the carving knife. For a crowd, the free recipe scaler scales a gravy recipe in real fractions, and the cooking converter tells you that ¾ cup of broth is 12 tablespoons when you're scaling one down.