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Thanksgiving is always hectic. Making your gravy early minimizes the chaos.
If you’re the person in your family who’s hosting Thanksgiving this year, you already know that you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. Hell, if you’re like me, you’ve already started planning your spreadsheet of dishes and making your grocery lists. But even if you’re the type of last-minute cook who just prays that everything will come together in the end, let me give you one essential piece of advice: make your gravy in advance.
The day of Thanksgiving is always hectic, no matter how much prep you’ve done ahead of time. Maybe you’ll accidentally forget to preheat the oven, or perhaps one of your side dishes won’t turn out. Making the gravy early is a great way to minimize that chaos. I don’t know about you, but gravy is an essential part of my Thanksgiving meal — I ladle it over pretty much everything on my plate, my body’s sodium level be damned — and I want it to be good. What I don’t want, though, is to be stressing over getting it ready while my whole family is starving, staring at me like hungry animals while I scurry to actually get Thanksgiving dinner on the table.
My Thanksgiving gravy begins with really good chicken stock, which I also make well in advance of the holiday, usually the weekend before the festivities. (You could, of course, make turkey stock — I’m not the boss of your bird choices.) After hours of simmering on the stove, I strain and ladle it into quart containers that sit in the freezer until a day or two before Thanksgiving. After thawing, I scrape away the fat and use that and a little butter to start making the roux for my gravy. Once that’s ready, I pour in the chicken stock until it’s nice and bubbly, then add herbs like thyme and bay leaf. Inevitably, I will burn my finger six to eight times tasting to see if it’s just right.
Once the gravy has cooled, I scoop it into the containers that once held my chicken stock and place a sheet of cling film over the top to prevent a skin from forming. After it’s cooled, it heads right into the refrigerator alongside the prepared green bean casserole and cornbread dressing that are waiting for the oven on Thanksgiving Day. When it comes time to reheat the gravy, I simply plop it into a saucepot, let it come up to a bubble, and add a little bit of chicken stock if it looks too thick. (If it looks too thin, or you add too much stock, you can always use a slurry of cornstarch and water to get it back to the perfect consistency.) If I’m really stretched for time or patience, I can alternatively just pop the whole thing in the microwave for a few minutes, and it turns out perfectly fine.
This is, in the grand scheme of a Thanksgiving dinner, a pretty minimal amount of advance preparation, but you’d be surprised at how much of a relief it is to know that you don’t have to stand over a bubbling pot of gravy after you’ve already cooked the turkey, baked all your casseroles, and set the table, all while trying to keep your nieces and nephews from terrorizing your potted plants or avoid arguing with your grandmother about politics. Once everything’s out of the oven, you can just sit down and enjoy the spoils of all your labor, and that’s a real Thanksgiving Day treat.
