Turkey Gravy Recipe: Drippings, Make-Ahead or No Drippings

Turkey gravy three ways: from drippings, made ahead, or with no drippings

Turkey gravy is the sauce that holds the Thanksgiving plate together: a roux of turkey fat and flour, loosened with the roast’s own juices and stock until it pours like velvet. This page gives you one ratio and three routes to it, so you can choose by your day rather than by luck. The recipe above is the day-of route: gravy from the drippings, made while the turkey rests. The make-ahead route builds the gravy days early from roasted turkey wings and finishes it on the day with the browned bits from the roasting pan. The no-drippings route needs no roast at all, and it is where you will find the gluten-free version. Giblet gravy, including the Southern version with hard-boiled egg, is a variation on any of them.

Which route? If you are roasting a whole bird that was not brined, the day-of gravy tastes best and is the least work. Make it ahead if the bird was wet-brined, kosher or self-basting (its drippings can only season), if you are roasting just a breast, which gives too few drippings, or if the stovetop will be crowded on the day. Go no-drippings if there is no turkey at all, or if a guest can’t eat gluten.

How much to make: plan on 1/2 cup (120 ml) per person, and more if you want leftovers for sandwiches. That is why this recipe makes about 4 cups (1 liter) for 8. A roast turkey rarely gives enough juice on its own: The Kitchn’s drippings gravy, for one 12 to 15 lb (5.4 to 6.8 kg) bird, tops the drippings up with as much as 2 cups (480 ml) of broth and still makes only about 2 cups (480 ml), which runs out at a table of eight. Every route here tops up with stock, so the quantity never depends on the bird. To scale, multiply the ratio rather than boiling a small batch down: for 12 people, make 6 cups (1.4 liters) with 9 tbsp each of fat and flour.

The gravy ratio: a thickness ladder, not a slogan

Gravy has one moving part: how much roux goes into each cup (240 ml) of liquid. The roux is always equal amounts of fat and flour, and the amount per cup sets the thickness. Per cup of liquid: 1 tbsp fat and 1 tbsp flour gives a thin, jus-like gravy that runs off the spoon, which suits a rich, gelatinous homemade stock. 1 1/2 tbsp of each gives a pourable gravy that coats the spoon and pools on the plate without flooding it; it is this recipe’s default, and it matches the “thin or light” sauce in the roux table of Wayne Gisslen’s Professional Cooking, about 1.4 tbsp flour per cup. 2 tbsp of each gives a thick, spoonable gravy that sits on mashed potatoes. That is Fannie Farmer’s 1896 ratio, 6 tbsp fat and 6 tbsp flour to 3 cups (720 ml) of stock, and The Kitchn’s today. This recipe uses Farmer’s exact 6 and 6, stretched over a fourth cup.

The widely repeated “3-2-1 rule” is where many gravies go wrong. In its usual form, from the University of Wyoming Extension, it is 3 tbsp flour, 2 tbsp fat and 1 cup (240 ml) of hot liquid. That much flour isn’t gravy: a USDA school-lunch recipe standard classes about 3 tbsp flour per cup as a thick white sauce, a “binder for soufflés, croquettes.” One widely shared version even defines 3-2-1 as 3 parts liquid, 2 parts stock and 1 part roux, which counts the liquid twice and mixes cups with tablespoons. Use the ladder instead.

Two things move you up or down the ladder. The first is roux color. The longer a roux cooks, the more flavor it has and the less it thickens, because heat breaks the starch into shorter pieces: America’s Test Kitchen measured a blond roux (3 minutes) at 14% less thickening power than a white one (1 minute), and a peanut-butter-colored roux (5 minutes) at 26% less. So a peanut-butter roux needs about a third more fat and flour than a white roux, and about a sixth more than this recipe’s blond one: 7 tbsp of each instead of 6. The second is gelatin. A stock from wings and necks that sets like jelly in the fridge brings its own body, so with homemade stock the gravy can land a rung thicker than the numbers say. Either way, judge it hot, at a simmer: roux gravy only thickens near the boil and keeps thickening as it cools.

Is it French? By construction, turkey gravy is a velouté, one of the French mother sauces: poultry stock thickened with a roux (our guide to the mother sauces has the family tree). But its ancestry is English. Escoffier served roasts with their jus, the pan juices deglazed and reduced, with no flour at all: “It is a mistake to remove all the grease from, and to clarify, the gravy of roasts,” he wrote in Le Guide culinaire (1903; quoted from the 1907 English edition), because “the gravy of a roast is not a consommé,” and “the gravy is invariably served separately.” When he did thicken a gravy for meat or poultry, his jus lié, he used pure starch, and in the same book, in the French original, he predicted that pure starch, potato starch or arrowroot would before long “replace flour in roux.” Turkey gravy is built like a velouté and served like a jus. Escoffier would have skipped the flour.

Make-ahead turkey gravy, from roasted wing stock

Make-ahead gravy is the calmest way to Thanksgiving, and it tastes like the day-of version because its flavor also comes from roasted turkey, just not the one you are serving. First, the stock. Heat the oven to 400°F (204°C). Cut 2 1/2 lb (1.1 kg) of turkey wings at the joints (if you already have the bird, add its neck, heart and gizzard, but keep the liver out) and spread them in a roasting pan with 1 quartered onion, 1 carrot and 1 celery rib, cut in chunks. Roast, turning once, until deep brown, 45 minutes to 1 hour. For scale: Food Network Kitchen roasts 1 lb (450 g) of wings for 30 minutes, and America’s Test Kitchen roasts a much bigger batch at 450°F (232°C) for 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Tip everything into a large pot. Pour 1 cup (240 ml) of hot water into the roasting pan (if it is glass or ceramic, let it cool for about 10 minutes first; see step 2), scrape up the browned bits and add that too, with 8 cups (1.9 liters) of low-sodium chicken stock, 1/2 cup (120 ml) of dry white wine, 4 thyme sprigs, 1 bay leaf and 6 black peppercorns. Bring it to a boil, then simmer gently, uncovered, skimming now and then, until it has reduced by half, to about 4 1/2 cups (1.1 liters), about 1 1/2 hours. Strain it, pressing on the solids, then cool it fast: stir it in a sink of ice water until lukewarm (fat that sets on warm stock holds the heat in), pour it into shallow containers and refrigerate it overnight. The fat sets into a lid on top: lift it off and use it as your roux fat, made up with butter to 6 tbsp. The stock underneath should be as firm as jelly. That is gelatin from the skin and joints of the wings, and it means body.

Then the gravy. Heat 3 cups (720 ml) of the stock and follow steps 4 to 6 of the main recipe; it will be thick, on Fannie Farmer’s rung, and that is on purpose, so don’t thin it or salt it yet. Keep the rest of the stock, about 1 1/2 cups (360 ml), for the day. Cool the finished gravy fast and refrigerate it. On the day it will have set almost solid; bring it to a rolling boil, whisking, and it loosens as it heats. The finish that makes it taste of this year’s turkey: while the bird rests, deglaze its roasting pan with 1 cup (240 ml) of the saved stock, heated (step 2), strain the liquid, skim off the fat and whisk it into the hot gravy, which brings it to 4 cups (960 ml) on the pourable rung. Simmer for a few minutes and check it with the spoon test (step 7), thinning with the last of the stock if needed. Add a little defatted drippings too if you like, tasting first (step 3), and season last (step 8).

Timeline: for a Thursday dinner, make the stock on Monday, then lift off the fat and make the gravy on Tuesday. USDA FSIS gives gravy 3 to 4 days in the fridge, counted from when it was made, so Tuesday’s gravy still leaves room for leftovers on Friday. For a longer lead, freeze the stock or the finished gravy; flour gravy freezes well, and cornstarch gravy doesn’t. Thaw it in the fridge the day before. In the UK, where leftovers keep 2 days and get one reheat, make the stock no more than 2 days ahead (or freeze it) and make the gravy on the day.

Turkey gravy without drippings, and gluten-free gravy

No roast, a turkey breast with barely any juices, or a bird whose drippings are too salty: the wing-stock gravy above is the best no-drippings gravy there is, because it roasts its own turkey, and the fat lifted from the chilled stock gives the roux the flavor of drippings (with no roasting pan to deglaze on the day, build it on 4 cups (960 ml) of the stock rather than 3). When there is no time for that, spend 30 minutes improving store-bought stock. Brown 1 chopped onion, 1 carrot and 1 celery rib in 1 tbsp butter or oil in a saucepan, add 5 cups (1.2 liters) of low-sodium turkey or chicken stock, 1 bay leaf, 6 peppercorns and a few thyme or parsley stems, simmer for 30 minutes and strain; top it up with stock to 4 cups (960 ml) if it has reduced below that. Make the roux with 6 tbsp butter and 6 tbsp flour and follow steps 4 to 8. For a deeper, meatier taste, Serious Eats simmers 1 tsp soy sauce and 1/4 tsp Marmite into 1 1/2 quarts (1.4 liters) of stock, and calls that amount about right for every quart (about 1 liter) of gravy; add them with the stock, before you salt. For savory depth without soy or wheat, brown 4 oz (113 g) of sliced mushrooms with the vegetables instead. For a vegetarian table, the same method works with a well-browned vegetable or mushroom stock.

Gluten-free turkey gravy: make the roux with sweet rice flour (also sold as glutinous rice flour or mochiko), swapped 1:1 for wheat flour, so 6 tbsp here. Despite the name, it contains no gluten (for celiac disease, buy one labeled gluten-free), and it is the easy gluten-free thickener that behaves most like flour after the fridge and freezer, because nearly all of its starch is amylopectin, which does not squeeze out water when frozen and thawed. In a 2012 study of 26 starches in Carbohydrate Polymers, waxy rice starch gels did not weep through five freeze-thaw cycles, and in Epicurious’s gluten-free gravy test, sweet rice flour gravy “reheated like a dream the next day.”

Cornstarch (cornflour in the UK) is fine for gravy you will eat right away. It has about twice the thickening power of flour (Illinois Extension: 1 tbsp cornstarch does the work of 2 tbsp flour in 1 cup (240 ml) of liquid), so for this batch whisk 3 tbsp cornstarch into 1/3 cup (80 ml) of cold stock, stir it into 4 cups (960 ml) of simmering defatted juices and stock, and simmer for 1 to 2 minutes, until glossy. It needs no roux; whisk in 2 tbsp cold butter at the end for richness if you like. Add it just before serving, because cornstarch thins with long simmering, turns thin and uneven when reheated, and weeps after freezing. It also makes a glossier, more translucent gravy than flour does.

Hidden wheat is the trap in gluten-free gravy. Regular soy sauce contains wheat, so use tamari labeled gluten-free. Marmite is made from brewer’s yeast and is not gluten-free: its label lists barley, wheat, oats and rye, and celery. Wondra is wheat flour. The best-known gravy mixes and jarred gravies contain wheat and milk: McCormick’s turkey gravy mix lists enriched wheat flour first, and Heinz’s jarred roasted turkey gravy, though thickened mainly with modified food starch, still lists bleached wheat flour and nonfat dry milk. Some stocks and bouillons contain wheat or barley (often as yeast extract or malt), so read the label. For a dairy-free gravy, use turkey fat or a neutral oil instead of butter.

Fixing turkey gravy: salt, lumps, grease and thickness

Too salty is the one problem you can’t cook away, and the famous fix doesn’t work. The Kitchn simmered a potato in boxed chicken broth for 30 minutes, covered, and reported that the broth “didn’t seem much less saltier”; Serious Eats notes that “it can take hours for the potatoes to take on a noticeable amount of salt.” A potato soaks up salty liquid, not salt, and lemon juice masks saltiness without removing any. What works is dilution: make a small unsalted batch of gravy, 3 tbsp butter and 3 tbsp flour cooked into 2 cups (480 ml) of unsalted stock, and whisk the two together until it tastes right. Better still, prevent it: taste the drippings before you build on them (step 3), and salt last (step 8).

Lumps are dry flour that swelled on the outside and sealed a dry pocket inside, which is why a roux, where every grain is already coated in fat, prevents them. If they happen, blend. In The Kitchn’s test on deliberately lumpy gravy, an immersion blender scored 10 out of 10 (1 minute, no froth), a food processor 9, a sieve 8 (smooth, but thinner, because you throw away thickener with the lumps), a countertop blender 7.5 (frothy for about 10 minutes) and 3 minutes of whisking only 3. With a countertop blender, fill it no more than halfway, vent the lid, cover it with a folded towel and start on low, because hot gravy can erupt. Never fix thin gravy by sprinkling dry flour or cornstarch straight into the pan: that is exactly how the test made its lumps.

Greasy or broken gravy, with a slick of fat on top or a yellow ring around the plate, has more fat than the flour can hold. Measure the fat, 6 tbsp here, and pour the rest off before you deglaze. If it breaks anyway, skim off what you can, then whisk in a little more starch (a spoonful of beurre manié) or blend it back into an emulsion.

Too thin: simmer it down before you salt it, or whisk in beurre manié, 1 tbsp soft butter mashed with 1 tbsp flour, a spoonful at a time, and simmer for 5 minutes; for a last-minute fix, stir 1 tbsp cornstarch into 2 tbsp cold water and whisk it into the simmering gravy. Wondra, a pre-cooked instant flour, can go straight in without lumping (it is wheat). Too thick: whisk in hot stock rather than water, which thins the flavor along with the gravy. Bitter: burnt fond or a burnt roux, and neither cooks out. Start a fresh roux, and use the liquid again only if it tastes clean.

Where turkey gravy came from: for a century, it was beef

No ranking recipe tells you this, but the gravy on the Thanksgiving turkey is a fairly young idea. When the word arrived in English, it didn’t mean meat juice at all. The earliest English gravies are sweet-spiced sauces of broth and ground almonds. The Forme of Cury, an English cookery roll of about 1390, stews rabbits in “grauey” made with blanched, ground almonds, sugar and powdered ginger, then adds: “Chykens in gravey. Take Chykens and serue hem the same manere.” A Middle English recipe dated 1381, “For to make Grave enforse,” grinds ginger and saffron with almonds, and the Anglo-French gravé is older still: the Anglo-Norman Dictionary dates it to 1235 to 1255, in Walter of Bibbesworth’s treatise, where a feast brings “rabbits in gravy, all sunk in sugar.” Where the word came from is disputed. The story repeated everywhere, that a scribe misread the Old French grané (“grained,” spiced) as gravé, is the Oxford English Dictionary’s own best guess: its entry, not yet fully revised, calls the word “of obscure origin” and the misreading “the most probable conclusion.” Others doubt it. The Middle English Dictionary points out that gravé, the supposed misreading, is actually the commoner Old French spelling, and Etymonline traces the theory to the 19th-century lexicographer Frédéric Godefroy, who, it says, “adjusted the spellings of his citations to match his theory.” Treat the scribe story as a theory, not a fact.

By the 1600s, gravy meant the juice that runs from roasting meat, and cooks used it as an ingredient: Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (first published 1660; quoted from the 1685 edition) makes a sauce for roast turkey from boiled onions, water, salt, pepper, grated bread “and the gravy of the fowl.” Then comes the surprise. When Hannah Glasse wrote “To make Gravy for a Turky, or any Sort of Fowl” in The Art of Cookery (first published 1747; quoted here from the 1748 edition), the turkey wasn’t in it. “Take a pound of the lean part of the beef, hack it with a knife, flour it well,” she begins: 1 lb (450 g) of beef, fried brown in butter, then stewed with water, mace, cloves, pepper, an onion, sweet herbs, a crust of bread and a little carrot. Her turkey went to table with “good Gravy in the Dish, and either Bread or Onion Sauce in a Bason.”

England’s leading cookbooks kept it that way for more than a century. Eliza Acton (1845) serves roast turkey “with good brown gravy, and well-made bread-sauce.” Her cheap gravy for a roast fowl does use the neck and the skimmed pan juices, but she notes that when cooks mix the pan gravy of roast game into the gravy they send to table, “it is not always considered an improvement by the eaters,” and in later editions, “to many persons it is peculiarly distasteful.” Isabella Beeton (1861) still sends turkey out with “a tureen of good brown gravy,” and her gravy for poultry begins with 1/2 lb (225 g) of lean beef, simmered for 3 hours and thickened with arrowroot. She printed a giblet gravy too, from the necks, feet, livers and gizzards of the fowls, which is worth remembering the next time you read that giblet gravy is a Southern invention.

The American drippings gravy, the one on your table, is in print in Boston by 1831. Amelia Simmons, in American Cookery (1796), the first cookbook by an American author, still uses “gravy” for the pan juices a turkey is basted with: “put one third of a pound of butter into the gravy, dust flour over the bird and baste with the gravy” (a third of a pound is about 150 g). Lydia Maria Child’s The Frugal Housewife (Boston, 1831 edition) does the modern thing: “When the meat is about done, pour these drippings into a skillet, and let it boil. If it is not thick enough, shake in a little flour; but be sure to let it boil, and be well stirred, after the flour is in.” For poultry, she notes, many people parboil the liver and gizzard, chop them fine into the gravy, and “the water they are boiled in should be used to make the gravy.” (Neither of the two first-hand accounts of the 1621 Plymouth harvest mentions gravy: Edward Winslow’s describes “fowle” and five deer, and William Bradford’s notes that that autumn there was “great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many.”) Then Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) fixed the proportions: “skim off six tablespoons fat; return fat to pan and brown with six tablespoons flour; pour on gradually three cups stock in which giblets, neck, and tips of wings have been cooked.” Three cups is 720 ml; the ratio is 2 tbsp of each per cup, the thick rung of the ladder, and still a common ratio (The Kitchn’s, for one).

The Southern signature is the egg. Giblets in gravy were a Boston and London habit as much as a Southern one, but hard-boiled egg in giblet gravy is in print from a Georgia cook by 1870: Annabella Hill’s Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (text copyrighted 1870; first edition 1867) boils the liver and gizzard, sprinkles flour into the dripping pan, and adds “the giblets cut up, and three or four hard-boiled eggs cut in half; serve in a tureen.” It is one of the earliest printed examples we found, and she sent the turkey out with “a dish of rice boiled dry,” the natural partner for that gravy.

Giblet gravy, and the Southern way with hard-boiled eggs

Giblet gravy is turkey gravy built on a stock of the neck and giblets, with the cooked heart and gizzard minced back in. Start it when the turkey goes into the oven. Take out the neck and the giblets, one usually in the body cavity and one under the flap of skin at the neck end (check both; see the safety notes). Put the neck, heart and gizzard in a saucepan with 6 cups (1.4 liters) of water or low-sodium stock, half an onion, a celery rib and a bay leaf, bring it to a boil, then simmer gently, partly covered, for 1 to 2 hours, until the gizzard is tender when pierced with a knife. Strain it and keep the liquid: it is your stock for step 3 of the main recipe (top it up with stock if you have less than you need), just as Lydia Maria Child advised in 1831. Pick the meat off the neck and mince it with the heart and gizzard.

The liver: most good cooks leave it out. America’s Test Kitchen warns that its “potent, unpleasant flavor” can ruin a good gravy, and its mineral bitterness gets stronger when it is boiled. If your family always adds it, simmer it with the other giblets for the last 15 minutes only, until it is cooked through with no pink, 165°F (74°C), and mince it in with the rest. Never stir in a liver that was seared pink.

To finish, make the gravy with the giblet stock (steps 4 to 8), then stir in the minced giblets and neck meat and let it come back to a simmer. For the Southern version, fold 2 or 3 chopped hard-boiled eggs into the gravy just before serving (Mrs. Hill used three or four for her turkey). Steam the eggs as for our deviled eggs, 12 minutes and then an ice bath, and they peel cleanly. Add the eggs only to the gravy you will serve now, not to the part you plan to freeze, because hard-boiled eggs don’t freeze well. Even in the South the egg is optional: “Some southern cooks add chopped, hard boiled egg to their gravy. Mama never did and neither do I,” writes the Southern food blog Deep South Dish, so it is your call.