This Ingredient Will Fix Your Burned Gravy

Gravy is a Southern staple. There's nothing quite like the classic biscuits and gravy dish to get your taste buds salivating. And what would a little bit of chicken fried steak be without gravy? Gravy can turn a dried out Thanksgiving Day turkey, the centerpiece of your family's dinner table on this American holiday, into an entrée that keeps eaters coming back for more. Gravy is also that something extra on your table that can really pull your meal together.

Per What's Cooking America, gravy, in its simplest form, is just meat drippings, some broth, and a thickening agent like flour or corn starch. It's a fairly straightforward sidedish to make, yet gravy is also quite easy to mess up. Per Eating Well, there are a lot of pitfalls to making this bread-sopping sauce. Lumpy gravy is never a good thing. Gravy that's too thick is also problematic, only made worse if it is too thin. But another great enemy of perfect gravy is having a burnt flavor. Maybe it was the drippings that were burned before you event started. Maybe you walked away from the pan for a moment and the next thing you knew, you had scorched it. 

Whatever the reason, burnt gravy can be a taste bud killer. Luckily, there's a remedy to get rid of that foul flavor and it involves one single ingredient you are bound to have in your pantry. 

The first step to fixing your burnt gravy is straining your gravy into a new, clean pot. The blog My Cooking School notes that you do not want to scrape the bottom of the pot when you do this or you will bring along more of that burnt flavor than you want. It may mean you have less gravy to work with, but that's okay. This will also give you the chance to soak the pot you burned your sauce in and loosen up the burnt gunk on the bottom. 

Next, comes the peanut butter. Yep, that delicious creamy and peanutty taste is going to save your gravy. Zest Nutrition Service suggests adding one teaspoon of peanut butter at a time until the burnt flavor is gone. 

However, if you or anyone who will be eating this gravy has any type of nut allergy, there are other ingredients you can try, starting with a raw potato. You still need to switch out pots and strain your gravy, but instead of peanut butter, you can toss in a raw potato for 20 minutes and it will absorb some of the bitter burnt flavor. Esquire shared that a cantaloupe, peeled and quartered into chunks, can also save your gravy, while adding a sweet element to the taste. If you don't have any of these items on hand, you might also try a little sugar, a pinch at a time, to rid your gravy of its scorched taste.