So a long while back I bought a 3 pound tube of Breakfast sausage on sale. I had ideas of cutting it into breakfast bagel size patties before refreezing.
I forgot, and now I have a frozen 3 pound tube of Breakfast sausage approaching termination date. And it seems my Sawz-All is dead, so I need to thaw and use at once. As tempting as it would be to eat 20+ biscuits and gravy for breakfast, I think my doctor would contraindicate that.
I hate refrigerated gravy, it separates into water and goo and never emulsifies back right. Does it freeze any better?
No, it does not freeze any better. It’s disgusting. I think a better idea might be to make however much sausage gravy you can eat in a couple of days, then use the rest to make spaghetti sauce. You CAN refreeze the sausage after it has been cooked.
I actually make a pretty good sausage gravy using sausage that was cooked and then frozen. You can’t freeze and reheat gravy successfully; just don’t try. But, again, the gravy will come out acceptably well if you add the frozen sausage to a fresh mix of the wet ingredients.
Usually, refreezing anything will result in a noticeable deterioration in flavor and texture, though it might still be OK to eat.
Personally, I’d pitch it.
I have no idea whether or not sausage gravy freezes well…I know that a lot of TV dinners have gravy in them (I think that most of them have gravy for the meat portion), but I don’t know if they use some special technique.
Next time, though, cut the chub into patties, and put the patties on a cookie sheet that’s lined with waxed paper, and freeze. When the patties are frozen, or mostly frozen, wrap them individually in waxed paper or freezer paper, seal with freezer tape, then put in a large zipseal bag. If you don’t wrap them individually, then they will meld together over time, IME. A patty or two will be enough to make up some sausage gravy for one or two people, or you can just fry up one or two patties for breakfast.
I do this with hamburger meat…making it into patties means that it will defrost quicker, and I’m still able to fry it into crumbles if needed, or I can mix up a small meatloaf if I want it that way.
Out of the kindness of my heart, I once turned out a batch of homemade biscuits and sausage gravy for a coworker here in Moscow who, I had learned, shared my predeliction for this great Southern dish (he was from Oklahoma). I even made the seasoned breakfast sausage from scratch using plain ground pork from the local market.
I filled an old ice-cream container with his share of the goodies and stuck it in the freezer at work. When he came in later that morning, I told him there was a present in the freezer for him. He went to have a look and came back a minute later saying, “What, you froze your cat’s vomit?”
Ingrate! :mad: I took it home with me and ate it myself, and let me tell you, it was delicious!
Hmmm. I buy the frozen Tennessee Pride sausage gravy all the time, though I’m sure that has some chemical in it to make it behave better. Try whisking the separated gravy briskly (after or while reheating) to get it properly reblended.
Mr. Downtown has the right of it to your general question though. Freezing squeezes some of the water from the sauces starchy bonds and this will give the thawed product a distinctly unappetizing"curdled" appearance, but stirring will usully reincorporate the lost water in a sauce tha was originally stable. Thinner sauces may stay curdled.
Lynn Bodoni does make a good point that freezing does most foods no favor, so Missy2U’s suggestion of freezing just the cooked sausage to incorporate into fresh made gravy mght be the most workable compromise.
