Drippings

A few days ago I cooked up a couple of wonderful steaks from Saffire Farms, but it was a bit too cold out for me to want to do it on the grill outside, so I put them onto one of my cast iron griddles in the oven. When the steaks were done, there were about a half cup or so of drippings left on the griddle, so I poured them into a small bowl and tossed them into the fridge. Drippings of course have an incredible amount of flavour, and are something I am really loath to waste. If all you get is small amounts like what I got from these steaks, it is really easy to keep a container in the freezer that you can keep adding drippings to until you get enough to do something useful with. This time I combined them with some deer drippings I'd canned up a few years ago, and made a truly fantastic sauce / gravy.

Ingredients

• about 2 cups of drippings
• 1/4 cup flour
• onion powder to taste
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste

The dripping usually have a small amount of fat in them, so the easiest way to separate it is to heat them up in a mason jar in the microwave, then stick the jar into the fridge (setting it onto a small cork heat pad / coaster, if you have glass shelves in the fridge like we do). The fat will come to the top and you'll be able to pick it right off with your fingers, like in this video. You then use the fat and some flour to make a "rou", and make your sauce from there.

I collected about 750 ml / 3 cups of pan drippings from the bird the other day, and of course made gravy with it. It's very easy to do, and with drippings from a brined bird you don't have to add any other spices - it is simply fantastic as-is. I just dump off the drippings, and be sure to scrape out all the gunk as well and use it, since it adds a lot of flavour.

One thing about pan drippings from a brined bird is that they can be extremely salty! The first thing you need to do is taste the drippings and dilute with water if they are too salty. Dump the drippings into a largish saucepan (3 quart / litre) and give them a good buzz with a hand blender until they are uniform with no chunks. Then taste, and dilute with a little water at a time, buzzing with the hand blender between additions. Note that you can happily leave it a bit saltier than you normally would tolerate, because when you put it onto your plate it will get diluted again by the things you are eating it with.