Hello! I’m Shannon Overmiller. I’m the Chef at The Majestic in Old Town Alexandria. We’re making home style meat loaf today.
Previously, I showed you how to make the glaze, bake the meat loaf while the meatloaf is baking we started the whipped potatoes. That’s going to take us approximately 20 minutes. During that time we can start the meat loaf gravy. So this way all of your ingredients and all of your components of your dish are coming together around the same time. And all together this whole dish takes about an hour to complete.
So, while our potatoes are cooking, I’ll show you what we need, the ingredients we need to start the meat loaf gravy. Start your pan on a low heat, simmer to start. You want a high heat. You want to start with caramelization. But since I’m going to be demonstrating I’m going to keep it kind of low. It’ll heat up on its own.
Things you need to start your meat loaf gravy are approximately two tablespoons of butter, one in the beginning to start, one in the end to finish, heavy cream, fresh thyme, about a tablespoon plus or minus.
Some of the meatloaf mixture that we had from before, the leftover and if you don’t have any of this leftover, you can always use the beef, the pork and any veal scraps that you have and as I stated before you want to make your sauces from what is in the actual dish. So this is fine to start. One chopped onion, flour, about a cup of white wine, salt and pepper to taste, and as we said in the recipe you can also use the drippings or the fan from the meat loaf when it’s done cooking.
Let us begin the meat loaf gravy. So to begin, you also need chicken stock, about two cups of chicken stock. And in the end, I like to finish this meatloaf gravy. It’s up to you entirely, but we like to use sautéed mushrooms and put that right it in the end of our meatloaf gravy.
And when sautéing mushrooms, you want a very high heat, salt, pepper, thyme, butter, olive oil, and that’s it. You want to get caramelization on your mushrooms, and you don’t really want them to boil at all. So now, also while we’re going along, you see the potatoes are now coming to a simmer, that’s what we want, not too heavy boil. As I said, once the potatoes come up to a boil, you want to bring it back down to a nice simmer. Don’t go crazy with the boiling, reduce your heat, right about a half to a quarter.
Now our pan is heating up, we begin our sauté for the meat loaf gravy. It’s a little hot so you can add anything you want at this stage. You can have garlic, carrots, celery, it’s just a simple gravy. Start to work your onions a little bit, let this come down to a little translucent in color. I’m going to add the meat at this point too because I want to get a little color in the meat so I’m going to bring the temperature back up and cook them together.
Add a little bit of beef and pork scrap leftover or some of the meat mixture itself leftover which makes a great sauce. So now we’ve got a good heat going. I want to get a little color on our meat. Just adds richness to your sauce, a little salt and pepper. You always want to layer your sauces.
Layering is very important especially with the sauce and just like what we do with the meat loaf, that’s a layer as well. If you build layers but go gently with them, then you can adjust as you go. It’s just doing things in layers adds each element of the dish in each element of the component of the item has its own individual seasoning. So, this is a very high heat, but I do want to get some color on this meat and season early especially with onions, with salt because it brings out the moisture.
So you want our meat to cook through. Check your potatoes; make that about 10 more minutes. It’s starting to come apart now. As you see just starting to yield and now my meat’s just about there, all cooked and that’s what we wanted. We can add a little tomato product at this point, some of the glaze leftover, add sweetness and the richness. So I’ll take a little bit of our glaze, usually use tomato paste at this stage but this is fine as well. It’ll give it some color as well, a couple of tablespoons and there we go.
So now we can start to add our flour once we cooked the tomato product out. We can add our flour and this is to start what is called sort of a roux for a base sauce. If you don’t choose to use flour or you got an allergy, you don’t have to use flour. This is just a classic way of thickening a sauce. And you can also just add your sauces and layer as you go, and then reduce it down to the consistency that you want.
But the classic meat loaf gravy uses flour and we’ll demonstrate that, just a tablespoon or two, just cover all the surface. You need to cook your flour out so you don’t want to taste flour. Glaze that off a little bit. Alright, so now you’re cooking your flour out and you see the mixture has come together and formed a paste like. And this is where you can deglaze. You want your flours cooked out. Careful not to get anything stuck to the bottom so you want have to remove bits from the bottom.
You want to take your wine. And this is deglazing. This is how you get all the little bits off, and then you want to reduce the wine so that when you deglaze you add in your liquid and take it off the heat and you scrape it. And that gets the good bits out off the bottom. You don’t want to have anything stuck to the bottom because you don’t want it to burn.
So now that we’ve added our wine and it’s reduced into the flour mixture, a paste is formed. The flours been cooked out. We’re ready to add the liquid to the base now to start our sauce and after we add the liquid we’ll bring it up to a boil, then reduce down to a simmer, and let it simmer until the meat loaves done probably about half an hour or 45 minutes. And then we’ll finish it with cream.
So let’s bring our temperature back up because we’re going to add liquid and that will counter balance the temperature coming up because we want to bring it up quickly. Add in some chicken stock. You want to add about two or three cups, some heavy cream.
And then we will strain this out and at this stage you want to add a little seasoning to it as well since you’ve added this liquid. You want to add your layers now. It’s a beautiful gravy, very rustic, very home style, creamy gravy. As soon as this comes up to a boil, it will thicken immediately but I don’t want it too thick so if you have to add more stock or more cream, feel free to. You want it just to the coating consistency which I showed you previously.
At this point, I like to taste it. See where my seasons at and add my herbs. I needs more salt, more pepper. Add my thyme, little now, fresh thyme, it’s about two tablespoon. And now that’s coming to a boil we reduce down and remember you don’t want it to burn. And that’s how you’re going to simmer your sauce.
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