Making real gravy with less fat using cold water

There’s nothing quite like real gravy with a roast dinner is there?  Gravy granules dumped into a jug of boiling water is just a poor substitute for the real thing, and why should you settle for this when you’re joint of meat has cooked nicely and produced tons of lovely juice that would be perfect for a boat of real gravy?

But there’s only one problem.  Skimming the fat off the juices can be a bit fiddly and it’s very difficult to remove all or most of it.   If you’re partner is watching their waste line then you might be under strict orders to use the granules, even though the real gravy tastes so much better.

How can you make proper gravy and do it with an absolute minimum of the  meat fat though?    Surprisingly it’s pretty straight forward and it’s a secret (no not really) that I only discovered recently by accident.

When making gravy I usually use the water from the cooking veg to top up the juices from the meat.  Sometimes I have just used some boiling water, but recently I was in a hurry and just poured some cold water into the saucepan that I’d transferred the juices over to before setting it back on the cooker. 

Unsurprisingly the fats in the liquid all solidified very quickly.  ‘Oh... ‘ I thought and then suddenly a light bulb lit up somewhere in the ideas section of my brain.  ‘Wouldn’t this be a perfect opportunity to just scoop out the fat with a strainer’ I thought to myself.  Sure enough with  the plastic strainer I had I managed to remove most of the fat, a good few table spoons  in this case.   It was a beef joint I was cooking at the time and there generally isn’t much fat on these (or so I thought).

Once you’ve removed your fat this way, you can simply bring the liquid up to temperature and then thicken in the usual way with granuals, flour etc. as you normally would.  The end result is lovely tasting gravy but with a lot less of the fat.

I haven’t tried this fat removal method with anything other than the beef yet but I'm willing to the results will be the same.  I’ve often cooked a chicken and thought it would be nice to make a proper gravy, but quite often the juices appear too fatty and my better half would have a fit if I attempted to make some proper gravy with it.   Next time I shall definitely be doing it though. 

Also, when I make stock for  soups I often cool it down and refrigerate over night so that the fat can be skimmed.  I’m wondering if this could be a quick way to remove fat from stock as well, assuming you concentrate it down when boiling the carcase first obviously, otherwise you’d just end up with a watery stock.

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