Comfort Food Southern Style – Homemade Tomato Gravy
If you think of your favorite comfort foods, you'll probably notice that they have something in common. They usually have ingredients that are gathered from what supplies the cook has on hand. Tomato Gravy is an example of this. Foraging through the garden and cupboards when times are tough yields interesting, and simple, ingredients that create wonderful pots of simmering comfort.
Even though we may not have had to forage for our food, our grandparents may have, and it is evident in their meals. Any time we gather around their table, we learn what it's like to have food created out of necessity. Their meals become our comfort foods, and those recipes are passed along to each generation.
When it comes to varieties in recipes, Tomato Gravy is at the top of the list. There are as many variations as there are cooks. We make simple tomato gravy during the winter with whatever we have on hand - if I have canned diced tomatoes, that's what I use. If I have tomato sauce, I use that. If the garden is ripe, I pick tomatoes. If I have onion on hand, I might throw some in. The basic flour and oil thickened tomatoes recipe has a lot of room for tweaking.
Tomato Gravy starts with a good, golden roux. Every cook knows you need a thickener to begin your tomato gravy dish and that thickener should be a mixture of oil and flour cooked until it's slightly golden in color - in other words, a roux. If you are afraid to let your roux get golden color, you will end up with a flour taste in your finished dish. You can use a combination of butter and oil for extra flavor, but don't use only butter as it tends to burn rather easily.
Tomato gravy can form the main meal or serve as a side dish or light lunch. Serve tomato gravy over some freshly made buttermilk biscuits for a nice warm lunch or snack. If you're serving a fried chicken dinner, add a pile of smashed potatoes covered with tomato gravy for a filling meal. You can also use tomato gravy to add flavor to other vegetables, like green beans or collards.
If you don't have a family recipe for tomato gravy, you can find recipes in cookbooks and on internet recipe sites. One thing you'll notice when you start looking is that there is a tremendous variety of recipes. Don't get overwhelmed. Rather, start with the simplest recipe you can find and don't get distracted with recipes that have too many ingredients for your liking. Even the simplest recipe made with just oil, flour, water, tomatoes, and salt, will be tasty when served on some homemade biscuits.
One thing to keep in mind when you're looking at recipes is that you'll see cooks using a Cast Iron skillet. I love my cast iron skillets too much to boil up tomato gravy in them. It looks pretty on the pictures in the cookbooks, but tomatoes are very acidic and will quickly destroy your cast iron skillet's patina. Use your regular pots and pans for this dish and save your cast iron skillet for frying up your chicken.
All it takes to serve a wonderfully filling comfort food is a few readily available ingredients - that's how all comfort foods are created. Treat your family to a simple and tasty Tomato Gravy made easily with ingredients you have on hand and warm your family inside and out with a heaping helping of this simple dish that's filled love.
Even the easiest tomato gravy recipe will delight your family at the dinner table. Look for even more favorite recipes that are simple to make but will give your dinner table a real homemade feel, and taste!
Tags: comfort food, cooking, easy recipes, family, food, Food Recipes, homemade tomato gravy, old fashioned tomato gravy, recipes, southern cooking, southern style tomato gravy
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