Bread Sauce
Milk infused with onion, clove and bay, then thickened with nothing but breadcrumbs. Older than gravy, better than it sounds, and the thing that makes a plate of roast turkey worth eating.
Photograph credit: Bread sauce (image of bread sauce on Wikidata Q4383705) by ElinorD · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
Photograph credit: ChristmasDinnerScotland by Qualit-E at English Wikipedia · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
How to Make Bread Sauce
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Stud each onion half with 4 cloves — pushing them through a bay leaf holds everything together and makes them easy to fish out.
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Put the onion, bay, peppercorns and mace in a pan with the milk and bring to a bare simmer over a low heat.
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Take off the heat the moment it steams, cover, and leave to infuse for 30 minutes. Do not let it boil at any point.
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Strain the milk into a clean pan, pressing the onion, and discard the aromatics.
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Stir in the breadcrumbs and set over a low heat for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring often, until thickened to a loose porridge. It thickens considerably as it stands.
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Take off the heat and beat in the butter, cream, salt, nutmeg and white pepper.
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Taste — it needs more salt than you expect — and serve warm rather than hot.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Notes for Getting It Right
- Fresh breadcrumbs, from a day-old white loaf, blitzed. Packet crumbs make a gritty sauce.
- Leave it looser than you want it. It sets firm within ten minutes of leaving the heat.
- The infused milk can be made the day before and strained cold.
Common Substitutions & Variations
- In a sauce, full-fat crème fraîche can usually take the place of the double cream; single cream is thinner and more likely to split if it boils, so keep it below a simmer.
Serving Suggestions
- Roast turkey or goose
- Cranberry sauce
- Pigs in blankets
Keeping and Reheating
Refrigerated for 3 days. Reheat gently with a splash of milk, whisking, as it sets solid when cold.
Bread Sauce FAQ: Common Questions
How long does Bread Sauce take to make?
10 minutes of preparation and 25 minutes of cooking, plus 30 minutes of infusing, so allow 1 hour 5 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 8.
Bread Sauce Nutrition Facts
No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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