You can tell the difference between myself and my two neighbor’s who are both in their 60′s. Not only is there an age difference but there’s a cultural difference as well. They are very much into soups during the winter, while for me it’s meat, beans and rice dishes. Even as a kid the few dishes we ate that were soups were homemade or canned chicken and noodle soup and Chili during the winter. The rest of time we had beans, meat…lots of cornbread patties and lots of rice dishes.
So, with winter here my tastes of course go to those type of dishes. Winter as a kid would mean that my mom would make these mini meatloaf-patties that she would cook down in a gravy. The rest of the time she made meatloaf using ketchup. I absolutely love meatloaf with gravy but my now 15 yr old daughter Lea loves it with ketchup and so for a few years I’ve made it just with ketchup though I personally am not that fond of ketchup on it. So, I saw something on t.v. the other day that has gotten my mind swirling a bit and that was a Brown Gravy using tomato sauce.
Now, I’ve heard of Tomato Gravy but I’ve never tasted or seen it in person before making this recipe. I know it’s a southern staple and a lot of people eat it quite frequently. I’ve lived in Tennessee and traveled throughout the south and every cookbook I’ve ever read on southern food always talks about Tomato Gravy. What I saw was the show Diner’s, Drive-In’s and Dives with host Guy Fieri on The Food Network, which is a show I love, was a guy taking chicken bones and placing it into a pan with water and baking it in the oven. Then he added tomato sauce, and let it cook down even further and then he strained all the bones off and what he had been a rich dark stock. Then he heated it up on the stove and added a slurry-(flour and water mixture mixed together until smooth to thicken up the gravy) and when it was nice and boiling, he added the slurry and thickened it up. He didn’t use any other spices and he used this gravy for EVERYTHING…meatloaf, chicken etc.
Well, I figured this would be my solution to our meatloaf problem, my need for gravy and my daughter’s tomato ketchup need. But I needed to do it where it was quick and it would be something I would repeat because lord knows roasting bones for hours is NOT something I would do every time to make gravy for meatloaf. So, I have to go back to making a roux…and using the tomato sauce with seasonings to make the gravy, but I want a richer looking gravy than the usual pasty tomato gravies I’ve seen online which are a sickly red. I want it like in that episode in which it was rich and colorful. The tomato was an accent flavor but still having a good gravy taste and consistency. I also don’t want it thick either, I wanted it thinner and smoother than the recipes I’ve found which means it will need more water than other gravy recipes. And so after looking up recipes and comparing them, I now know two things…It needs to be a really good gravy and it needs to have a mild tomato flavor. So, here’s my recipe:
Southern Style Tomato Gravy
Meat Drippings-bacon, chicken, beef, sausage etc.
Onions, chopped small
4 cups of water
4 to 5 tablespoons of flour
1/4 cup butter
1 cup of tomato sauce
Onion Powder, to taste
Garlic Powder, to taste
Salt/Pepper, to taste
In a pan, saute onion in pan with meat drippings and butter. Add 4 to 5 tbsp’s of flour and fry until brown. Add a small amount of the water and stir and let fry some more. Add rest of water, stirring constantly so there’s no clumps. Add 1 cup of tomato sauce and stir. It will look like tomato soup. Add some of the spices to taste. Bring to boil, stirring constantly and then turn down to simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste and adjust the seasonings and let sit to rest. It will be a thinner gravy just like brown gravy. Serve over your favorite meatloaf…Enjoy!!!
