How do I make a really good chicken or turkey gravy or demi-glace?
Here’s the main part of a letter I recently wrote to one of our old friends on this very subject: Making demi-glace is a study in time. Time spent chopping and browning the bones and carcasses you froze and saved the last time you made chicken; time spent washing and chopping carrots, onion, celery, parsley, and any other of your favorite “stock” vegetables: time spent preparing a top-notch chicken stock. The trick to a good demi-glace is unfreezing the drippings you stored the last time, “Gravy Straining” (separating the fat from the good juices), adding them to your best chicken stock, a long slow simmering to reduce, then thickening and seasoning to taste. Most cookbooks tell you how to get there (and every one has its own tips and tricks — such as adding clean onion skins to enhance the color, for example — which makes it at times even more confusing). And all of them tell you, it takes time. After years of this, we found a shortcut that we liked so much we decided to offer it to o
