Many people ask how sauce differs from gravy. After all, gravy, just like sauce, can change the appearance of any dish, highlight its taste and make it unique.
Gravy
, like sauces, can be thin and thick, sweet and spicy, cold and hot. They are also prepared on the basis of broths using various ingredients (pieces of meat, fish, poultry, vegetables). But gravy, unlike sauce, is usually served with a dish as an additional side dish. Good gravies for potatoes, boiled pasta, crumbly porridges and dishes made from cereals and vegetables, as well as meat, poultry and fish products.
Let's prepare some gravies.
Vegetable sauces
Option #1. With eggplants (zucchini or zucchini)
Cut eggplants (zucchini or zucchini) into small cubes. Peel the garlic and chop finely.
Heat 3 tbsp in a frying pan. spoons of olive or sunflower oil, add chopped vegetables and chopped garlic, salt and pepper and fry for 5 minutes until light golden brown.
Finely chop the tomatoes, add to the pan, stir. Pour in the cream and 2 ladles of water (you can use the broth you used to cook pasta or potatoes) and simmer for another couple of minutes. Pour half of the gravy into another bowl and puree it, then return it to the pan and mix everything.
Serve the gravy as an additional side dish to any dish. If the gravy is being prepared for pasta, then hot boiled pasta can be mixed with it, and, if desired, sprinkled with grated cheese and herbs.
Option #2. Lenten gravy.
You will need: 1 carrot, 2 onions, 2 tbsp. spoons of ketchup, 3 tbsp. spoons of soy flour, vegetable oil, salt, ground black pepper to taste.
You can add bouillon cubes (vegetable, mushroom), a little garlic.
Chop the onion and carrots (you can also grate the carrots on a coarse grater), fry in vegetable oil.
When the onions are fried, add soy flour, stir until smooth and add boiling water to make a not very thick gravy.
Option #3. An excellent addition to boiled potatoes.
You will need: 100 g sour cream, 3 tbsp. spoons of tomato paste, 1 onion, 1 tbsp. a spoonful of flour (without a slide), vegetable oil, dry oregano, salt to taste.
Peel the onion and cut into small cubes.
Pour a little vegetable oil into a frying pan, add the onion and fry until transparent.
Add flour to the onion in the pan, stir and fry for 1 minute.
Then add sour cream and tomato paste, spices, and a little water.
Bring to a boil over high heat and simmer for about 3-5 minutes.
Mushroom gravy
Required:
200 g mushrooms (preferably white), 2 onions, 2 tbsp. spoons of sour cream, 100 g of cream. 1 tbsp. spoon of flour, 4 tbsp. spoons of sunflower oil, salt, ground black pepper, herbs to taste.
Wash the mushrooms, cut them into pieces and place them in a hot frying pan with sunflower oil and fry until tender for 30-40 minutes.
While it's frying, peel the onion, chop it and add it to the fried mushrooms, mix everything well and let the onion brown for another 10 minutes.
Separately dilute the sour cream. Pour the cream, flour, salt, pepper and the entire whipped mixture into the mushrooms and onions and bring to a boil. You can add greens to the finished gravy. Suitable for any side dish.
Seafood gravy
Pass boiled shrimp and squid through a meat grinder, mix with hot cream and grated cheese.
I don’t know about anyone, but I really like gravy with offal, for example,
Gravy with liver
Required:
100-150 g of liver (any), vegetable oil, butter (if not, then not necessary), allspice, cloves, bay leaf to taste, 2 tbsp. spoons of flour, 100-150 g of sour cream or mayonnaise.
Grate the frozen liver on a coarse grater. Place the mashed liver mass in a frying pan with heated vegetable oil and, stirring constantly, cook for 2-3 minutes. Then add 2 tbsp. spoons of flour and stir again for a couple of minutes. If you have butter, add it; if not, you can do without it.
Then pour in sour cream or mayonnaise, stir and add 100-120 ml of water. When it boils, add spices and turn off.
Ideal with pasta, noodles, etc., buckwheat or rice porridge.
And how delicious gravies made from chicken by-products are! For them you can use not only chicken liver, but also hearts and ventricles.
We will prepare one of these gravies for you.
Gravy with chicken hearts
Rinse the chicken hearts well, you can cut them into halves, sprinkle with salt, pepper and leave for a while. Then fry. Add finely chopped onions, fry everything together, add a little water to just cover the offal with onions, and simmer over low heat until fully cooked. You can add chicken seasonings, tomato sauce, garlic.
At the end of cooking, add a bay leaf and chopped herbs.
If the gravy turns out to be very thick, it can be diluted with hot boiled water and brought to the desired consistency.
Each time your gravy with offal will have a different taste if during cooking you add everything you have on hand: mushrooms and carrots, white roots, zucchini or eggplant. And it will be incredibly tasty every time!
Gravy with minced meat
A wonderful sauce for boiled pasta, as well as rice and cereals!
Option #1
Required: 2 tbsp. spoons of olive or sunflower oil, 1 finely chopped medium onion, 1 finely chopped carrot, 1 finely chopped celery stalk, 750 g of minced beef or 225 g each of minced beef, veal and pork, 60 ml of dry red wine. Besides
, 800 g of canned tomatoes, chopped (do not pour out the juice), 2 teaspoons of salt, ¼ teaspoon of ground black pepper, 1/8 teaspoon of ground nutmeg, 60 ml of heavy cream.
Heat vegetable oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, carrots and celery and cook for 10 minutes until soft, stirring occasionally.
Add the minced meat to the vegetables and cook until the meat loses its pink color, stirring frequently to break up any lumps.
Pour in red wine, stirring constantly, and bring to a boil over high heat. Add tomatoes along with juice, salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Bring the mixture to a boil again, reduce heat to low, and simmer, uncovered, for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Add cream and heat through, stirring.
Before serving, top the pasta with half the sauce. (Cool remaining sauce and refrigerate for use the next day.)
If desired, you can add grated Parmesan or other cheese to the pasta.
Option No. 2
Place the ground beef in a frying pan (without oil), stir well while frying so that the meat spreads and becomes uniformly crumbly. Add water, tomato paste, salt and dry wine to taste.
Option #3
You will need: 500 g of mixed minced meat (pork, beef), 3-4 tbsp. tablespoons vegetable oil, 1 large onion, 1 carrot.
If you wish, you can also take 1 tbsp bell pepper. spoon of flour. In addition, 1 tbsp. spoon of tomato paste, 1 teaspoon of adjika, 1 teaspoon of ground paprika, ground red and black pepper, salt, garlic, parsley and cilantro to taste.
Heat the vegetable oil well in a frying pan and add the minced meat to fry.
Peel the onions and carrots, cut into cubes and add to the fried minced meat. Fry everything together for about 10 minutes. Then add flour, paprika, salt and pepper. Mix everything well.
After this, sequentially introduce tomato paste, adjika, and fresh bell pepper. You can add hot water to cover the minced meat. Simmer the gravy for 20 minutes. At the end of cooking, add chopped garlic and chopped herbs.
Dessert glaze
This gravy is served with pancakes, pancakes, sweet casseroles and puddings.
You will need: 300 ml milk, 50 g flour, 100 g butter, 250 g cream, 3 egg yolks, 60 g sugar, 10 g vanilla, 1 tbsp. a spoonful of crushed nuts or poppy seeds.
Add flour and butter to milk. Boil and cool to 50 degrees.
Beat cream with yolks, sugar, vanilla, crushed nuts or poppy seeds.
Mix milk and cream until you get a smooth gravy.
We are limited in our choice of side dishes. Potatoes, cereals, pasta... How to make the side dish not boring? The gravy will not only make dry porridge more juicy, but will also transform a familiar dish beyond recognition. There are different sauces - meat, cream, mushroom. The vegetable gravy that this article is devoted to will help you out on fasting days or with a vegetarian lifestyle. It is basically inexpensive, and it also provides the body with much-needed vitamins. You can find a selection of the best vegetable gravy recipes below.
Quick Recipe
Sauce made from fresh vegetables has its own canons of preparation. An indispensable ingredient in it is flour. It is this that gives the sauce thickness, making it enveloping and viscous. Vegetable gravy made with sour cream, milk or cream turns out to be incredibly tasty. This sauce does not require a variety of ingredients. The components can be very basic. And if you have unexpected guests, put the spaghetti on the boil and quickly prepare a quick vegetable sauce for it. Peel and finely chop a medium-sized onion. Grate the carrots with large shavings. Pour some vegetable oil into the frying pan. When it is well heated, add the onions and then the carrots. Fry for about four minutes. When the onion turns golden, add a tablespoon of flour. Stir and simmer for another three minutes. Carefully add a little water so that it barely covers the vegetables. Now add two finely chopped cloves of garlic. Now it's the turn of the tomato paste. You need to add two tablespoons. If there is no tomato paste in the house, ketchup can successfully replace it. But you need more of it - three or four spoons. And you should add salt to the gravy carefully - the ketchup already contains seasonings. When the contents of the pan boil, you need to reduce the heat and leave to simmer under the lid for a quarter of an hour. During this time, the spaghetti will arrive.
Recipe for vegetable gravy with cream
This sauce is ideal for those pasta products that have a hole inside - horns, feathers, etc. First, fry a finely chopped onion and a clove of garlic in olive oil. Pour boiling water over four tomatoes, remove the skin, cut them and also place them in the frying pan. You can also use canned tomatoes in this recipe. Add half a teaspoon of sugar, salt, spices (especially basil and oregano). After half the liquid released by the tomatoes has evaporated, add a spoonful of butter and half a glass of heavy cream. Simmer over low heat for about five minutes. If the vegetable gravy remains too liquid, adjust its thickness with flour.
Peanut sauce
- 60 g peanut butter;
- 2 cloves of garlic;
- 60 ml soy sauce;
- 2 pinches of cayenne pepper;
- 30 ml water.
Time – 15 minutes.
- Peel the garlic, remove dry roots;
- Grind the slices and put them under a press;
- Beat the peanut butter with water until smooth. If you don't have any paste, you can make it in minutes from whole peanuts. To do this, you just need to crush whole nuts in a blender to a paste;
- Add garlic, soy sauce and pepper to the nut mixture and beat. Ready!
How to season buckwheat porridge
Let's reveal a secret: each side dish requires its own gravy. And even the sauces for different types of pasta differ from each other. As for buckwheat, this grain already provides a lot of fiber, so no flour is needed. The vegetable gravy will thicken as the ingredients simmer. Cut the onion, carrot, sweet pepper, two cloves of garlic and a large tomato (don’t forget to remove the skin). We will also cut a stalk of celery. Pour two tablespoons of vegetable oil into the frying pan. First, fry the onion and garlic for literally five minutes. Then add carrots, bell peppers, celery. Reduce heat and stir-fry. If it starts to burn, you can add a little water. Then add salt, season with spices and simmer under the lid for about ten minutes. Only when the vegetables become soft can you add tomatoes. Continue to simmer, adding water if necessary, for seven minutes. If the gravy is too sour, add a pinch of sugar.
The best recipes for homemade sauces for vegetables
Sauces for vegetables are something new for our people. But, nevertheless, people try it and they like it! Why are you worse? Start cooking right now to quickly find out how unusual it is and how tasty it is! Moreover, sauces are suitable not only for vegetables, they can be served with salads, cheese slices, meat, seafood and so on.
- Peel the shallots, wash and dry;
- Heat a frying pan, pour oil, add onions;
- Fry them whole until golden brown on all sides;
- While the onion is browning, cut the lard into strips;
- Rinse and chop the leek;
- Add lard and leek to the onion, add flour and simmer until golden brown;
- Pour in the broth as a sauce base, water and wine;
- Add thyme and crumble bay leaves;
- Cook for twenty minutes over low heat;
- Add olives and black olives to the sauce, add salt and pepper - ready!
Sauce for rice
This cereal has a neutral taste. Vegetable gravy as a side dish for their rice porridge will add juiciness to the dish. Finely chop the onion. Cut a carrot and three bell peppers of different colors into strips. Place the vegetables in a saucepan or deep frying pan. Pour in a glass of mushroom broth (the recipe allows you to use bouillon cubes). Add two tablespoons of tomato paste. Mix everything well. As soon as the broth boils, reduce the heat. Season the rice sauce with salt, bay leaf and spices. Add two tablespoons of wheat flour. You can vary the gravy for rice and make it soft and creamy. To do this, mix two tablespoons of flour with half a glass of sour cream. After this, add the mixture to the sauce and boil.
Tomato sauce is suitable for any side dish, as well as meat and fish dishes. Especially if it's made from fresh tomatoes. Chop the onion into half rings. Place it in a frying pan with hot vegetable oil. Remove the skin from half a kilogram of tomatoes and cut out the middle. Blend the rest. Add tomato puree to the onions. When the tomato sauce boils, add a spoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt and a little cinnamon. This sauce can be served separately by pouring it into a bowl and garnishing with chopped fresh cilantro.
Mushroom sauce made from dried mushrooms for buckwheat
If you have dried mushrooms at home, prepare a hearty mushroom sauce for buckwheat. And buckwheat porridge will acquire a new taste and aroma. To prepare this dish you don't need any meat at all. Making gravy for buckwheat without meat is very easy and quick.
Products:
- dried mushrooms - 1 small handful;
- onion bulb;
- butter -75 g;
- low-fat liquid sour cream - 75 g;
- wheat flour - 70-90 g;
- spices and dill - optional;
- a little salt.
How to prepare mushroom sauce for buckwheat: First pour warm water over the dried mushrooms for 1.5-2 hours. Cook the broth from the soaked mushrooms for about an hour. Pour the prepared mushroom broth into a separate bowl. Prepare vegetable frying. To do this, peel the onion head, wash it and finely chop it. Then fry it in butter. When the onion becomes soft and acquires a golden hue, add boiled mushrooms and simmer the mixture for about 15 minutes. After the time has passed, without ceasing to stir the mixture, slowly pour the flour into the frying pan. Make sure that no lumps of flour form.
Add broth to mushroom sauce. Its quantity depends on the desired thickness of the gravy. Season with sour cream, add salt, spices and dill as desired. In a couple of minutes, the mushroom sauce made from dried mushrooms for buckwheat is ready. You can season buckwheat porridge with it and serve.
Preparing gravy in a slow cooker
Such sauces will also be healthy, because you can use less fat to prepare them. Any vegetable sauce in a slow cooker is prepared according to the same principle as in a frying pan or saucepan. Pour some vegetable oil into the bowl. Place vegetables: onions, garlic, carrots. If desired, this classic set can be supplemented with green beans, bell peppers, and champignons. Turn on the “Frying” mode for ten minutes. The vegetables should become golden brown. Add flour. Stir with a wooden spatula and continue frying. Then add water or broth. We set the device to the “Extinguishing” mode and cook for another forty minutes.
“Diet” for any person seems like a frightening word and promises all sorts of deprivations. However, diets are different, because a well-designed diet that includes only healthy foods allows you not only to quickly lose weight, but also to eat delicious food every day. Moreover, proper diets also have a healing effect on the body, without leading to stomach diseases, hormonal imbalances and other troubles that are characteristic of fasting. A light, healthy dinner as part of a healthy diet can be prepared from quite familiar foods. You will like the recipe for vegetable gravy for pasta, buckwheat or any other side dish so much that even after completing the diet you will mark it on your list of favorites.
Vegetable gravies have the wonderful properties of being low in calories yet packed with amazing nutritional value. You can prepare such a sauce both for a festive table and for an everyday meal, since it does not take much time and effort. All the ingredients can be found in every grocery store, and many of them are likely to show up in your refrigerator at any time.
You will need:
- Tomatoes – 4 pieces
- Carrots – 1 medium piece
- Onions – 1 medium piece
- Garlic – 3 cloves
- Bell pepper, sweet – 2 pieces
- Vegetable oil – 2 tablespoons
- Dill, fresh – 1 small bunch
- Parsley, fresh – 1 small bunch
- Basil, fresh – 3 sprigs
- Ground black pepper - to taste
- Salt - to taste
Number of servings – 5
Cooking time – 30 minutes
Oven-baked vegetables with cheese sauce
This vegetable dish is ideal both as a holiday treat and after a hard day in the evening for dinner in its own version, which does not require meat addition. It is not at all difficult to prepare and does not take long. Even an inexperienced cook who is just starting to cook can handle it.
List of products with weight required to prepare a large portion of this dish:
- Fresh potatoes in medium-sized tubers, preferably with thin skin, intended for boiling – 850 g
- Fresh healthy young carrots – 400 g
- Cauliflower in fresh inflorescences – 350 g
- Broccoli in fresh florets – 250 g
- Canned young green peas – 200 g
- Canned young sweet corn in grains – 200 g
- Sharp cheese, hard (can be noble cheese with blue mold) – 100 g
- Vegetable oil – 50 g
- Coarse salt – 100 g
- Spring or mineral water, always without gas – 2.5 kg
List of products for making cheese sauce:
- The most common milk, cow’s milk 3.2%, can be bought from the store – 600 g
- Butter with a sweet creamy taste, natural, fat content not lower than 82.5% - 120 g
- Any hard cheese, coarsely grated in advance – 150 g
- Flour – 150 g
- Spices – of your choice and to your taste
- Balsamic vinegar with neutral taste – 30 g
- Nutmeg powder – 10 g
- Fine sea salt, iodized – 10 g
Steps in step-by-step preparation of a dish:
- Wash and peel the potatoes. Leave in a bowl/saucepan with clean ice water for an hour so that the starch “comes out” a little.
- Peel, wash and cut the carrots into slices.
- Place a saucepan filled with water over medium heat, add salt and boil.
- Place the carrot slices in a saucepan of boiling water and cook for no more than 5 minutes. Then transfer the carrots into a bowl with a slotted spoon and leave to cool, but continue to boil the water in which they were cooked.
- Cut the potatoes into large cubes and place them in the same pan with water where the carrots were boiled before. Boil the potatoes, like carrots, for no more than 5 minutes. Like carrots, catch the potatoes from the broth with a slotted spoon and place them in a bowl where the carrots are already cooled.
- It's time to boil broccoli and cauliflower florets in the same water. The boiling process also lasts no more than five minutes. Then use a slotted spoon to place them with the rest of the previously boiled vegetables in a bowl.
- While the vegetables are cooling, you need to prepare the cheese sauce. To do this, place a deep frying pan with a thickening at the bottom in the form of a non-stick coating over medium heat and put all natural butter with a sweet creamy taste into it.
- As soon as the butter melts, put the flour in it and fry it a little: about two minutes, no more. Add milk little by little to the flour and fry, stirring constantly. The flour mass should be lightly thick and homogeneous, lump-free.
- Turn off and immediately, before the mixture has cooled, add nutmeg powder, salt, neutral balsamic vinegar, spices (of your choice) and grated cheese. To stir thoroughly.
- The cheese should melt and distribute evenly throughout the entire volume of the sauce being prepared.
- Add canned peas and corn and freshly prepared cheese sauce to a bowl with boiled vegetables.
- Coarsely grate the prepared hard cheese (you can use noble cheese with blue mold) and place it in a small bowl.
- Coat the bottom of a glass or ceramic dish prepared for preparing baked vegetables with vegetable oil and fill with a mixture of vegetables in cheese sauce.
- Sprinkle grated cheese evenly over the vegetables.
- Place the mold filled with vegetables in the sauce in a preheated oven (up to 220 degrees) for half an hour.
You can eat it as soon as the dish is ready. Readiness can be determined by the beautiful crispy cheese crust that appears on top of the vegetables. You can serve prepared vegetables in the same form in which they were prepared.
!Recommendations for this recipe!
Instead of fresh broccoli and cauliflower florets, you can use fresh frozen ones, prepared in advance last summer. This recipe can be used to cook any vegetables.
Vegetable smoothie
Everyone will like this sauce: dieters, vegetarians, and those who love to eat delicious food. Despite the “green” composition, the gravy turns out really appetizing. Another important point is its benefits.
Tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots... All these ingredients are complemented by fresh herbs and pepper - a real vitamin mix! Not to mention that vegetables are an essential source of fiber, which ensures the normal functioning of the digestive system and removes toxins from the body.
In order for the preparation of vegetable sauces according to world cuisine recipes to be perfect, you need to select the ingredients correctly. For example, it is better to choose large, soft tomatoes, from which it is easier to remove the skin. Carrots should not be too large or overripe, as even when fried they will retain a bitter taste. Lastly, the best option for gravy is red onion. It is sweet, juicy and does not have a strong odor.
