Gravy Is 10x More Delicious & Creamy With One Canned Pantry Staple
Fruit, veggies, dairy, grains, and protein make up the five main food groups, and while we adore them in all their myriad, delicious forms, we'd love to add a sixth: gravy. This essential component of millions of Thanksgiving and roast dinners binds a plate together, while serving double duty as a vehicle for texture and flavor. Making good gravy can be a bit stressful, and if it's your first time hosting Thanksgiving, there's at least one mistake you can avoid: Use a can of cream of chicken soup in your gravy for instant results. Is it cheating? Maybe. Will anyone care when they're slurping your delicious gravy down? Nope.
Whether you add this canned pantry staple to the pan first and thin it out with chicken, vegetable, or turkey broth, or vice versa doesn't matter, it works spectacularly well. Depending on how many you're cooking for, you can add a full tin of chicken soup or just a few spoonfuls. Either way, it will give your gravy a rich, savory flavor — but that doesn't mean you can't add anything else to the mix.
A touch of paprika will add an underlying smokiness to your gravy and works particularly well with roast turkey meat. We like to add black pepper to amp up the heat a little and make the veggie sides shine, but personal preference will rule the roost. A little nutmeg supercharges sausage gravy but we'd be down for using it here, too.
There's a can of soup for almost every kind of gravy – even the sausage kind
Adding a can of cream of chicken soup works brilliantly for a gravy that's destined to be poured over poultry, but it will do the same if you're serving a pork roast too, as the flavor profiles are quite similar. The savory depth of the chicken soup enhances the pork, while the meat is rich enough to handle the gravy's creaminess. Dare we say it, but we think tinned cream of chicken soup is worth incorporating in this recipe for Southern biscuits and sausage gravy, too.
But why stop there? Cracking open a can of beef broth will give a brown gravy all the flavor oomph it needs to complement roast beef or lamb, while vegetarians can get in on the delicious gravy action too, by pairing a mirepoix or vegetable broth with a tin of cream of mushroom for an equally yummy, meat-free gravy. This hack will even work if you're monitoring your salt intake, as Campbell's cream of mushroom is one of two low-sodium offerings.