That little nip in the air reminds me that it's time to start adjusting our daily menus. It's the perfect season to introduce a little warm, tasty treats to the breakfast table. So we can't blame Chef Jerry Pellegrino for thinking about biscuits and gravy?
This simple and filling dish is probably as old as the American colonies. It's exactly the kind of cheap, filling dish that old-timey farmers needed to start their day. It was favored because the most expensive ingredient, the sausage, could be stretched out, getting more food for their dollar. Since then the dish has found a heartland in the south, but it has migrated north and west. Since the name "biscuits and gravy" is almost the recipe, we'll break it down into two parts.
First, the biscuit: although it's perfectly legal to use canned biscuit batter à la Pillsbury Hungry Jack biscuits, home-made are far better. I would recommend one of our classics, the buttermilk biscuit. (recipe below) Variations include the popular sweet potato biscuit. These are easy. Just put together your dry ingredients as usual, but then you fold in some puréed cooked sweet potato. It's that simple.
Other variations suggest adding chopped up hot peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, or shredded cheese.
Now for the gravy portion of the recipe. This part is so simple it's often one of the first things children learn.
The heart of the recipe is the sausage, and this can be just about any kind of sausage you like, as long as you can crumble it up somehow. To start, fry the sausage in a skillet until it is brown and well-cooked. Then you'll want to crumble the sausage. Next you stir in some all-purpose flour, taking care to completely coat the cooked sausage and soak up the fats at the bottom of the pan. Then you will want to slowly pour in some cold milk. Stir it and keep stirring it over medium heat. The sauce will thicken. Finally add whatever seasonings you like. Salt and pepper, of course, plus things like Italian seasoning, stewed tomatoes, green chilies, your favorite dried herbs, garlic powder or a pinch of nutmeg.
One obvious variation is to replace some or all of the sausage with bacon. The bacon fat will work brilliantly with the flour and give that prized bacon flavor.
You'll also see chopped up fatty ham, quite often paired with maple syrup. And if bacon will work, so will pancetta.
You can take the idea further afield by using shrimp instead of sausage. Of course once you have your shrimp and milk gravy prepared, you may want to swap out grits for the biscuits.
Here is our recipe for biscuits and gravy:
For the buttermilk biscuits
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbs sugar
2 tbs making powder
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup cold butter, cut or grated into chips
1 large egg
1 cup cold buttermilk
1. Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix thoroughly. Grate or cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Work it until the butter is little pea-sized pieces.
2. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients. Crack the egg into it and add the buttermilk. Using a fork, stir the ingredients until you have a evenly mixed batter.
3. Roll the dough out onto a slab, working it until you have a 2-inch-thick cake. Using a biscuit cutter, cut out as many biscuits as you can, then re-roll the remaining dough and cut as many as you can.
4. Place the raw biscuits on a pan covered with wax paper and place in a 400° oven for about 15 minutes, or until the tops start to brown.
For the sausage gravy
1 pound of fresh sausage, crumbled
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 cups of milk
Seasonings including salt and pepper, dried sage, and red pepper flakes to taste
1. Fry the sausage in a skillet until it is all cooked and no pink remains. Work the crumbled sausage over so that it keeps falling apart into smaller pieces.
2. Take the skillet off the heat and stir in the flour thoroughly.
3. Now over medium heat, pour in the milk and stir constantly. The milk will combine with the pan fats and the flour to thicken and make a delicious gravy.
4. Add your seasonings and thoroughly incorporate.
5. Split each biscuit in half and ladle the gravy over them in generous proportions.
