The second courses mainly involve gravy or sauce in their composition. And not everyone knows how to make gravy . And meanwhile, it is he who is able to radically change the whole dish, giving it originality and diversifying the taste spectrum.
Most often, gravy is done while cooking meat, in parallel. That is, first you need to fry the meat cut into slices in fat or oil so that it turns white. Then add water to the pan in such a way as to hide the meat under it, wait for the boil and reduce the heat. Now let the meat stew under the closed lid for as long as it should be cooked according to the recipe.
At this time, in another pan you need to cook a vegetable fry, since making gravy without onions and carrots - only spoil the meat dish. Gourmets can add not only well-known vegetables to frying, but also many others. Someone likes chopped green beans, someone - root parsley, and someone even considers the presence of mushrooms as a special chic.
In most often, onions are fried until golden brown. Then put in the pan carrots, cut into strips or grated on a coarse grater. Later you can add zucchini or cabbage, parsley or celery, chopped tomatoes or bell peppers.
Of course, if it is decided to cook gravy with mushroom flavor, then first of all, mushrooms begin to fry before onions, because they cook much longer than vegetables. Then you should work according to the above scheme: onions, carrots, root parsley and so on.
10 minutes before the end of frying the meat, put the vegetable frying in a pan with meat and mix. You can add a little water if all the liquid has evaporated. For color, many add tomato paste, sauce or ketchup to the gravy. Next, the culinary proceeds to the next action, which will help him make the sauce thicker.
There are several ways to do this. Someone chooses sour cream, someone - mayonnaise. The most important thing in this process is the thorough mixing of the mass so that no lumps form. Mayonnaise should also be added a little bit, and not pour the entire amount at once.
Another method of preparation is to make gravy from flour. First of all, in this case, you need to fry the flour in a dry frying pan until golden brown. Although it is quite acceptable to skip this step: toasted flour can cause heartburn.
The next point will be the dissolution of flour in cold water. The formation of lumps in the mass must not be allowed! Then the flour suspension is carefully poured into boiling meat with vegetables and is just as stirred as in the case of mayonnaise.
But how to cook gravy from flour, if we decided to feed our guests or loved ones not with stew, but, for example, cutlets or meatballs? Then, according to the described recipe, vegetable frying is done, fat is added to it, on which meatballs or meatballs were prepared, and then tomato is added and the flour mixture is poured into water.
There is an option for vegetarians, as you can make gravy without any meat ingredients, without sour cream and mayonnaise. Only frying vegetables, ketchup and flour mixture.
Gravy is used to the second dish, beautifully watering the side dish. As it can be boiled potatoes, whole or in large pieces, mashed potatoes, buckwheat, millet, rice, oat or wheat, pasta or vegetable dishes: stewed cabbage, vegetable stew, stuffed cabbage, stuffed zucchini or bell peppers.
In principle, if the cook knows how to make the sauce, he can add a special piquancy to any dish. For example, vegetarian mushroom sauce with ordinary boiled potatoes will turn into a festive dish, and dry buckwheat porridge with gravy on the fat from cutlets will be absorbed by eaters at such a speed that the famous glutton Robin Bobin Barabek will envy everyone!