You can't just pour flour and broth into a bubbling pot of stuff....it will lump faster than you can whisk.

For 12 cups of broth, I would have saved out 2 cups of the broth....cold. Then mixed flour ( no wondra) in the cold broth and added that slowly to the simmering broth....while whisking like mad.
To thicken 12 cups of broth you will need about 1 1/2 cups of flour.
Linda C

If you have a blender you can fix the lumpy gravy by putting it in the blender. If it is too thin you can add some flour right into the blender and then reboil it. Did you save the lumpy gravy?
Joann

You don't have to make a roux to thicken gravy. You can just mix some flour with some cold water, bouillon, broth, or milk (or whatever you want) then whisk that together and pour it into some hot gravy and stir/whisk/cook until it's as thick as you need it to be.

I can't tell you why it lumped up, maybe your roux was too hot when you added the broth to it?

She didn't pour "flour and broth into a bubbling pot of stuff." She said she made a roux which is what I always do. It's prefereable to use a roux although you can put flour into a cold liquid. The reason being that it doesn't take nearly as long to get the floury taste out with a roux.

I think you needed to wisk well while cooking. Also, I believe you didn't have enough roux for the amount of broth.

Potato flour.

Honest, none of the issues of wheat flour.

In the gravy recipes I've been looking up, it appears that the basic recipe is 2 T drippings/butter(or whatever fat you use) 2 T flour to ONE cup liquid. I'd just stay with that ratio pretty much.

Lots of people like to make their gravy as fat free as possible...a slurry of flour and broth thickens nicely without making a roux.
And the general guidelines for making a roux to thicken gravy is equal parts flour and fat. The OP didn't have nearly enough fat for the flour to make a roux, and not nearly enough flour to thicken 12 cups of broth. The formula for a medium thick gravy is 2 Tablespoons of flour for each cup of liquid.

Yes, Beverly's right. I made a roux and then, after it cooked for a couple minutes, added the liquid (broth). But several of you have mentioned the temperature of the liquid or the temperature of the roux. My recipe said to have the broth simmering in a different pot while making the roux--but it seems that I should had added cold broth. Or else I should have let the roux cool off.

I did whisk like mad, pretty much continuously. Maybe not long enough.

Linda says there should have been about 1-1/2 cups of flour (more than double what I used). But it seemed like the broth wouldn't "accept" even that much!

Joann, I didn't save the lumps. But tomorrow, when I have the pan drippings, I will add a mix of flour and cold liquid, as ArkansasGirl suggested.

And THIS, folks, is why I never used to make gravy! Finally got up my nerve, and I find that the technique and the chemistry are a lot more confusing than I expected. But I'll get it right, eventually. (Anyway, it tastes good.)

Thanks for the opinions and advice,

Sue

The easiest way to make a roux into a white sauce or a velouté (what you were making, with broth), is to have the liquid boiling, or close, and add it all at once while whisking. Very fast and very easy. This is a Craig Claiborne technique, and it's saved me a lot of time over the years.

Yep....that works well when making a cup or 2....but 15 cups of broth?
A slurry is the only way...I have made gallons of gravy and gallons of white cheesy sauce using a slurry of flour and either milk or broth slowly poured into the simmering liquid....and whisking like mad.
Sue, not sure what you mean by the broth wouldn't "accept" that much flour...you can make a thickened sauce that will stand a spoon straight up.
Just for the record, I made 2 2 gallon pots of turkey gravy last June by cooking up the bones and skin with onion celery etc....and thickening it with flour and some boxed chicken broth....because I was too dumb to save some of the turkey broth before I heated it all.

I always have lumpy thin gravy if I use Wondra. I am very tempted to just throw it out, because I only bought it to have a small container to make gravy from instead of draging out the whole bag of flour. It doesn't matter if I make a roux or a slurry, it's thin and lumpy with the Wondra.

Tami

Well, I'm flummoxed. I was certain that it was a whisking problem-- it sounds like you did just what I do otherwise. But you do have to really, really whisk it. You have to whisk the crap out of it to get the flour to dissolve in the fat, and then add a little stock, and whisk the crap out of it to get the roux to dissolve in the stock. And then add a little more stock and whisk the crap out of it again. Could it have been too much flour for the amount of fat? Was the flour completely dissolved in the fat before you added stock? That amount of roux doesn't even sound like enough to thicken 4 cups of stock to me, so I think that's why it was thin (and obviously, the flour being in clumps rather than distributed into your gravy wouldn't have helped)

Well, I see that Mistake #1 (not reading the recipe carefully and thus getting the proportions wrong) was probably the worst one, but there were other ways I could have improved my chances. Next time, I'll try regular flour or potato flour in a slurry.

Linda, I meant that the gravy seemed to "reject" my soft paste of flour and fat (maybe I'm taking this too personally, LOL!); i.e., it wouldn't incorporate them into the gravy.

Interesting that there are so many different techniques for making gravy.

Sue

Well Sue I wish you lived nearby and we would figure it out together. Don't give up on gravy. You will master it if you try another time or two I'm sure.

Beverly

I am wondering if your paste of flour and fat had been cooked to the point of almost "bread" and that's why it wouldn't smooth out.

Jessica, I think I whisked exactly as you described. The flour did dissolve in the fat, and when I added the first cup or two of broth, it had a smooth consistency (Linda, it wasn't bread-like; it stayed soft and moist and smooth until the broth covered it up). I kept whisking while I added more broth, but eventually, when the liquid in the pot was deep, I stopped--maybe too soon.

Funny thing is: last week, when I used some previously frozen chicken stock to make the turkey gravy, I did exactly the same procedure, and it turned out fine. But I think I had much less broth in the mixture last week. Anyway, I should have measured it and calculated how much flour and fat was needed to make it into gravy.

Well, I thank you all for your interest in helping me learn how to make gravy. And Beverly, thanks for the kind words!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you,

Sue

I never measure for any of it! And I almost never whisk my gravy. Most of the time I use a spatula/flipper to stir it.
I make both a roux and a slurry depending on the circomstances at the time which I use. Wondra just doesn't make good gravy for me. Try all purpose flour next time.

tami

Tami, I'm tempted to throw away my Wondra! But I've never had this problem before. I think the biggest problem was the proportion of flour/fat to liquid. I was way off.

Here's how it turned out: on Thanksgiving, I heated up the "gravy," which was still very thin, in a big pot. After skimming off most of the fat and adding a bit of wine to deglaze the roasting pan, I added the pan drippings to the pot. Then I made a slurry and added it, a little at a time, while continuing to whisk and stir. I let it simmer for a while, so that the floury taste would dissipate. Gradually, the gravy thickened up (I think the criterion is that it will coat the back of a spoon, and it did). It was really delicious! Totally worth the angst and extra efforts.

Thanks, everyone, for helping me "save the day!"

Sue

1 Tablespoon cornstarch for each cup of liquid. drippings, etc.

Mix room temp liquid and cornstarch together until you don't feel lumps. (these won't be lumps like flour, just thick in some parts of the pan) The cornstarch soon desolves in the liquid.
When you are ready to make your gravy heat to boiling, whisking all the time until it thickens.

When I was in high school my best friend's mother taugh me to make this type of gravy. She was a cook in a school cafeteria.

Tami, I never measure either, I heat the drippings in the pan, add flour until it looks like "enough", then start adding broth to the roux.

Amanda likes a different procedure altogether. She mixes half a cup of flour with a stick of butter until she gets a paste. She brings the broth and drippings to a boil, then starts stirring in the butter/flour mixture, a spoonful at a time, until the gravy is thick enough. It's lumpfree every time but can have an inordinate amount of fat and calories.

She says that shouldn't count, gravy isn't meant to be a FOOD, it's a condiment, LOL.

Annie

I rarely have issues with my gravy but sometimes when making a large quantity I will get lumps.

That's when I pull out my trusy ole' stick blender.............smooth in no time!