Can you believe that this is the most coveted kitchen utensil in my mom’s aresenal?
Its a birch twig whisk and apparently it is Scandinavian in origin.
On Thanksgiving day when I Facebooked about the fact that my brother did not want me to bring anything to dinner I received a lot of congratulatory emails from my friends. “Those invitations are worth their weight in gold!”, they shouted. That may be but I always end up helping out. Almost inevitably I am asked to make the gravy. I don’t know why as I don’t have a secret recipe. I make the same gravy my mother made and I’m sure hers came out of The Joy of Cooking. Giblet stock, Wondra, more stock, giblets, water chestnuts, stock, Wondra, stock, salt, pepper….wallah! No secret ingredient. I’d really like to try out a new recipe and searched the food blogs a week before the holiday hoping to find a showstopper to impress everyone with. (Perhaps one with cognac?) . I asked one of my favorite food bloggers why his Thanksgiving roundup didn’t include gravy. The answer was obvious. Who wants to cook an entire turkey BEFORE thanksgiving just to do a gravy recipe?)
The secret to our gravy is not an ingredient but the whisk you see above. My mother got it a couple dozen years ago and it is without a doubt the best whisk around for making gravy. It quickly scrapes up the brown bits, including those in the hard to reach corners, and works the gravy easily and quickly. You really get a lot of whisk surface area moving the sauce around and working the flour into the stock. The clumps up quickly and easily. Once you have tried it, you will never want to use a regular whisk for gravy again.
The whisk you see above has been traveling for years, going to whomever is hosting the dinner. For years we have been trying to find them in a store or online so that we can all claim one as our own but this has not been easy and each year we ask Mom to bring the whisk. Well, I finally found them here and ordered them for everyone. Mom can even retire hers! It has served us well. (Hi Mom, I know this ruins the surprise but I wanted to share this while there is still time for people to buy one. Oh, and I have no affiliation with that website!)
