Copycat McCormick Country Gravy Mix (Just Add Water)

This copycat McCormick country gravy mix takes five minutes to whisk together, stores in a jar for months, and turns into thick, peppery white gravy with nothing but water. No packet. No drippings. No 7 a.m. realization that you’ve got a pound of sausage browning and nothing to sauce it with.

It’s the third gravy mix in this series and the one I reach for most. Brown gravy is a dinner thing. Country gravy is a weekend thing — biscuits, chicken fried steak, breakfast potatoes, a fried egg on toast when there’s nothing else in the house.

Why You’ll Love This Country Gravy Mix

• Whisk once, use for months. One jar replaces four or five packets.
• Pantry staples only. Nothing you’d make a special trip for.
• You control the salt. The store packet is aggressively salty; this isn’t.
• No MSG, no caramel color, no flavor enhancers.
• Water or milk, your call. Water gives you the packet-accurate version; milk makes it richer.
• Tastes like sausage gravy even without sausage — there’s a reason for that, and it’s in the ingredient notes below.

What’s Actually in the McCormick Packet?

The store version is built on enriched wheat flour, wheat starch, whey, and salt, with flavor enhancers carrying a lot of the load. Strip that back and only two things actually define country gravy: dairy and black pepper. Everything else is thickener and seasoning.

So that’s where this copycat puts its weight — nonfat dry milk powder for creamy body, and a genuinely assertive amount of coarse black pepper. If homemade white gravy has ever tasted flat to you, under-peppering is almost always the reason.

Ingredients You’ll Need

Makes about 2¼ cups of dry mix.

• Nonfat dry milk powder: this is what makes it country gravy instead of white sauce, and it’s what lets the mix work with plain water. Don’t skip it. It lives near the baking aisle.
• All-purpose flour: the primary thickener.
• Cornstarch: thickens faster than flour alone and keeps the gravy from tasting pasty.
• Chicken bouillon powder: the savory backbone. Chicken, not beef; beef pushes this straight into brown gravy territory.
• Coarsely ground black pepper: coarse, and a full tablespoon’s worth. This is the signature flavor and the thing most people under-do.
• Onion powder: savory depth without any texture.
• Garlic powder: background, not foreground.
• Rubbed sage: the trick that makes this taste like sausage gravy before any sausage hits the pan. Breakfast sausage is seasoned with sage, so building it into the mix means the plain version already tastes right.
• Dried thyme: rounds out the sage.
• Salt: start conservative and adjust. The bouillon is already doing a lot.
• Ground celery seed (optional): a quiet savory note found in most commercial gravy mixes.

How to Make Country Gravy Mix

Step 1: Whisk the dry ingredients. Combine everything in a medium bowl and whisk a full minute. Milk powder clumps and flour settles — an unmixed jar means one batch is all pepper and the next is all flour.

Step 2: Break up any lumps. If the milk powder has compacted in the box, push the mix through a fine sieve. Twenty seconds, and it’s the difference between smooth gravy and specks.

Step 3: Store it. Transfer to an airtight jar. It keeps six months in a cool, dark cupboard. Label it with the date and the conversion ratio so you’re not looking it up every Saturday.

How to Make the Gravy

Plain country gravy (makes 2 cups): whisk ½ cup of dry mix into 2 cups of cold water in a saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, whisking constantly. Simmer 1 minute until thickened, then taste and adjust the salt and pepper.

Sausage gravy: brown 1 pound of breakfast sausage, breaking it up as it cooks, and leave the drippings in the pan. Whisk ½ cup of mix into 2 cups of cold water separately, pour it into the skillet, and simmer 2 minutes until thickened. If you’d rather not stand over a skillet, air fryer breakfast sausage works — cook the links or patties, chop them, and stir them into the finished gravy.

Richer version: swap the water for whole milk. The dry milk in the mix means you don’t need to, but it’s very good.

Why Cold Liquid Matters

Whisking a flour-based mix into hot liquid is exactly how you get lumps. The starch on the outside of each clump gelatinizes on contact and seals dry flour inside, and no amount of whisking afterward fully fixes it.

Cold liquid gives the flour and cornstarch time to disperse before anything begins to thicken. Start cold, whisk while it heats, and you get smooth gravy every time. If a batch does go lumpy, a fine strainer rescues it completely.

What to Serve Country Gravy On

Biscuits, first and foremost. From a can, my Air Fryer Canned Biscuits are done in under ten minutes and hold up under a heavy ladle. From scratch, the Air Fryer Copycat KFC Biscuits are buttery and tender, and the Copycat McDonald’s Biscuits are the ones my family asks for by name.

Chicken fried steak is the other classic pairing. My Copycat Cracker Barrel Chicken Fried Steak is worth the effort, and on a weeknight the Air Fryer Frozen Country Fried Steak gets you there in twelve minutes.

For breakfast, spoon it over Air Fryer Breakfast Potatoes with a fried egg on top. It’s also excellent on mashed potatoes, fried chicken, or a split baked potato.

And when you need the savory brown version for dinner instead, that’s my Copycat McCormick Brown Gravy Mix — same just-add-water format, built on beef bouillon rather than chicken.

Variations

• Gluten-free — swap the flour for an equal amount of 1:1 gluten-free baking blend, or use 6 tablespoons of cornstarch total and skip the flour entirely. The texture comes out slightly silkier.
• Dairy-free — powdered coconut milk in place of the dry milk. Flavor shifts a touch sweet, but it thickens properly.
• Extra peppery — double the black pepper. Real diner country gravy is far more peppered than most people expect.
• Bacon gravy — brown chopped bacon instead of sausage and build the gravy in those drippings.
• Lower sodium — low-sodium bouillon and skip the added salt.

Storage

Dry mix: airtight jar, cool dark cupboard, up to 6 months. Don’t refrigerate it — condensation is what ruins a dry mix.

Prepared gravy: refrigerate up to 4 days. It thickens a lot when cold, so reheat over low heat with a splash of milk or water, whisking until it loosens. Freezing works but the texture suffers on thawing, so I’d make it fresh.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much homemade mix equals one McCormick packet?

About ½ cup of this dry mix equals one 2.64 oz packet of McCormick Country Gravy Mix and makes roughly 2 cups of prepared gravy. A full batch of the recipe gives you four to five packets’ worth.

Why is my gravy lumpy?

Lumpy gravy almost always means the mix went into hot liquid instead of cold, or it wasn’t whisked constantly as it heated. Start with cold water, whisk the whole time it comes up to temperature, and pass it through a fine strainer to rescue a batch that’s already lumpy.

Can I make country gravy without sausage?

Yes — the plain version above is exactly that. The rubbed sage in the mix gives it the sausage-gravy flavor profile with no meat in the pan at all, which is why it works over biscuits or potatoes on its own.

My gravy is too thin. How do I fix it?

Simmer another minute or two; it thickens as it cooks and thickens further as it cools. If it’s still loose, whisk 1 teaspoon of cornstarch into 1 tablespoon of cold water and stir that in.

Can I use water instead of milk?

Yes, and that’s the whole point of the dry milk powder in the mix. Water gives you the packet-accurate result. Milk gives you a richer gravy. Both work.

Is McCormick Country Gravy Mix gluten-free?

The standard packet contains wheat flour, so no. This homemade version is easy to make gluten-free using the swap in the variations section above.

What’s the difference between country gravy and sausage gravy?

Country gravy is the milk-based white gravy itself. Sausage gravy is country gravy with browned breakfast sausage stirred into it. Same base, one extra ingredient — which is why this single mix covers both.

More Copycat McCormick Recipes

Once you’ve made one, the rest go fast. These are the packets and bottles I’ve already reverse-engineered:

Weeknight dinner packets — McCormick Taco Seasoning is the one to start with, and Homemade Sloppy Joe Seasoning and Beef Stew Seasoning Mix cover the rest of the ground-beef rotation.

Tex-Mex — Homemade Fajita Seasoning is cumin-forward with a citrusy edge, Homemade Chili Seasoning Mix handles your next pot of chili, and Al Pastor Seasoning is the one worth making if you’ve never tried it.

Grill and burger blends — Copycat Montreal Steak Seasoning for that coarse, peppery crust, and McCormick’s Smash Seasoning built specifically for smash burgers.

Everyday bottles — Lemon Pepper Seasoning with no dyes or fillers, and Perfect Pinch Rotisserie Chicken Seasoning for that signature savory roast-chicken flavor.

Gravy — Copycat McCormick Brown Gravy Mix is the just-add-water dinner version.