Recipe:Earth Veggie Yeast Gravy
Earth Veggie Yeast Gravy
1/2 lb butter 3/4 cup wheat flour (made into a roux) 3/4 cup nutritional yeast (better flavor is key here) 1 cup veggie stock 1 cup soy milk or use cow milk (can be left out) 3 cups water 1 lb mushrooms carrots, onions, celery for mirepoix - bay leaf, thyme
More oniony variant:
1+ pound onions, chopped or sliced and carmelized
Thicker variant:
potato broth for thickening in addition to the toasted wheat flower.
Make mirepoix. Saute and cook mushrooms in butter until well done, remove most of the mushrooms to a sauce pan. Overcook some carrots, onions, and celery until well beyond transparent, deglaze pan with veggie stock or water.
Brown flour in dry pan, add yeast and butter, cook further. Add stock, soy, mirepoix, some water and reduce.
Earth Note: I have often left out the soy milk component. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used that in this recipe. The browner the mirepoix, mushrooms, and onions, the more flavor there is. I have, the last several times, gone a little wild with the onions and ended up with something slightly more like gravy-flavored onion soup slop. Yum.
Nov 29 2008
I am making this recipe without having purchased the ingredients specifically to make it. So it is 'stuff in the fridge and cupboard'.
One large onion, roughly chopped into slices, browned in a bit of butter. An ounce or three of grated potato thrown in with the onions to brown, to act as starch for thickening later. After browning, put into the sauce pan. Sautee the mushrooms, brown.
Chopped third of bunch of celery, half a bunch of parsley, chopped and grated carrot.
Add water to sauce pan to cover onions plus a bit, throw in bay leaf, thyme. Low simmer with cover. We're just melding the flavors out here, working some of the onion into the water, soaking and extracting the herbs.
When mushrooms are fully browned, throw them in sauce pan, deglaze saute pan again into sauce pan, probably want a little more water in the sauce pan here, just keep the things in water, not deep.
Throw celery and a bit of butter into saute pan, throw carrots on top, sautee until celery goes translucent and overcooked, overcook carrots. Throw in parsley, overcook. Add more butter, a bit of water, cook down pretty hard, we're basically making stock.
With a bit of butter toast/fry the flour (I am using whole wheat pastry flour, cause I have it). After it browns, put in water to make a thick goop. Throw in a big pile of yeast into sautee pan, 1 cup? 1.5 cups? water, make a slurry. Simmer down, add some more water, a little salt, taste it. It should be really strongly flavored of yeast. Hopefully you have good tasting yeast :] If you haven't yet learned to like the yeast flavor, give yourself some time. It is like coffee or cacao, kind of, a strong beery, medicine-y tone in the top of the flavor. But it is quite yummy once you get to know it.
The smell is like a wet bread or grandma's stuffing. Yeasty bready mist coming off the sauce pan.
I added a ton more thyme as it went to simmer. I also added another half cup of yeast.