I wonder how many people eat B & G as a main breakfast dish?
It used to be a side dish with bacon and eggs. Seems like People usually don’t eat a full course breakfast anymore.
I am particularly fond of the very (Black) Peppery Bob Evan’s homemade biscuits and sausage gravy. Sawmill and Bacon Gravy just aren’t the same… they pale compared to “real” biscuits and gravy. Some are better than others, my WV Family recipe is pretty good, but I’d rather have Bob Evan’s.
I was puzzled by the sausage gravy. I was thinking something like the brown onion gravy one would pour over sausages. So I googled images and, my god it’s got meat in it but it’s white/grey. It looks like something that was food yesterday.
I’ll grant that it’s not the most appetizing looking food. It’s sausage in a Béchamel sauce, basically. Flour and butter in a roux and then cream or (sometimes scalded) milk. Ugly, but tasty!
I’m just going to take my talents to the chicken à la king thread.
Near as I can tell, whatever’s left in the pan when you cook meat makes a fantastic sauce. This stuff was never explained to me when I was a kid. Our family didn’t do this. If we wanted a stew, we used bouillon cubes. If we wanted a sauce, we used corn starch. But we never thought of the grease in the pan as the foundation for an accompanying sauce, much less for the next meal. We adored the biscuits-and-gravy we ate at our once-a-year visit to Aunt Magdalene, but the general concept never caught on with us.
Now, of course, if I make a simple hamburger I’m in a quandry as to whether to do use the grease. All I have to do is throw in a little flower, and when that’s nice and cooked start working in some milk or even just water. Suddenly, I have a hell of a lot of flavor I can throw on potatoes, bread, pork chops or even just rice. I can even make a kind of ghetto egg fu yung by throwing it on top of scrambled eggs made with handfulls of frozen vegetables and chopped onions.
And of course, biscuits are a great companion as well. But I lack the ambition to develop biscuit-making skills. Plus, while I see some people have a particular love for the sausage part, I actually find a gravy of just bacon grease more satisfying overall. It may be the technique I’m using, so feel free to comment:
You take the chub of breakfast sausage and fry it in crumbles. You then coat the results in flower and cook until the flower itself is cooked. Then you work in milk until you like the consistency. All the while you’re adding salt and pepper to taste.
With bacon it’s more like you bake the stuff on a broiler pan. You put some of the grease from the broiler pan into a fry pan and add flower until it’s nearly saturated. You cook the flower, then start working in the milk, salting and peppering. Then you can sprinkle in crumbled bacon if you like.
Overall, I find the gravy a smoother process and a tastier from bacon. The advantage with the sausage is that it’s delicious and meaty, but I’d almost rather just cook it separately and throw it into some bacon gravy.
Last night, *Diners, Drive Ins & Dives *visited a Kentucky restaurant with biscuits & gravy on the menu. (Hate the host–but the food is often good.)
The cook made a light roux with vegetable shortening & flour–then added hot milk. The sausage was cooked separately & added at the last minute to heat through; she explained this prevented overcooked sausage. Of course, it’s also easier to make a smooth sauce without lumpy sausage. (Could the sausage grease be used in the roux? Surely.)
Then she ladled it over her own freshly made biscuits. In my experience, gravy is easy. Biscuits are hard.
I have seen - but never eaten - this concoction. It looks utterly repulsive. As I understand it, it’s just sausage grease thickened with flour and thinned with milk, right?
Who on earth came up with this stuff?
Poor people eating low on the hog, I expect. Poor, brilliant, people.
Uh, sure. Just as ham is a thigh sliced off of a pig and salted. Cheese is gunk strained out of milk and exposed to bacteria. Pie is pulverized fruit thickened with flour baked in a shell made of flour stiffened with fat.
Seriously, though, we’re talking about one of your basic cooking techniques – cooked flour adds body to a liquid. But it takes a long time to do by just throwing the flour in the liquid, so the flour is first cooked in a bit of fat and then the liquid is slowly added to create the sauce. You can create different outcomes by choosing a fat that brings its own flavor. This technique is used at every level of cuisine from 5-star French restaurants to hillbilly kitchens.
I once made some Bisquick biscuits and used some left over beef stroganoff. It wasn’t the same thing, but at least you got that yummy crumbling biscuits with the warm meaty sauce. (I was just really jonesing for some)
I don’t like country, white, sausage, pepper, or any other name for that gravy.
Sometimes I just old-man my breakfast with biscuits, gravy, and eggs, mix that shit up and shovel it in my mouth.
Yummmm…
Bob Evans’ is the BEST. The one regret I have moving to Colorado is no Saturday morning biscuits and gravy breakfast at Bob Evans
i like my biscuits with jam, not gravy. gravy is not very healthy
Whereas biscuits with jam is?
What’s in a biscuit? White flour and fat.
What’s in jam? Sugar.
Hmmm. 
I like my Bob Evan’s biscuits and gravy with a drizzle of honey… just gilding the lily.
I’m puzzled by the notion of pouring “brown onion gravy” (whatever that is) over sausages. You pour maple syrup over sausages!
Shortening? Nasty. You can avoid overcooking the sausage by simply removing it from the pan. Add the flour to the fat, make a roux, add the dairy, thicken, dump the sausage back in until heated. Shortening? Really? ::shudder::
I had basically the same experience. It sounds really awesome to me in theory, but on the few occasions I tried it, it was pretty boring.