Sausage gravy. Just fry up your sausage and then use the reduced fat to make a roux. Cook the flour to just golden brown and then add milk or half milk half cream. Stir until it thickens up.
Incidentally, it’s also great if you do the sausage with onions and green pepper and use it as a topping for baked potatoes.
Y’all made me cook potatoes for breakfast this morning! I wasn’t willing to wait for baked though. I sliced them into steak fries. Then I microwaved them for five minutes to get their insides steaming. Then tossed with light olive oil and salt and fresh cracked pepper and into the oven at 500F (fan).
Done in 15 minutes and scrumptious. I should have taken a photo for you. The surfaces were perfectly blistered with browned, crispy bubbles. Nom!
The only caveat to this, retail breakfast sausage today might be called “Jimmy Lean”, there generally isn’t near enough fat to make a standard “batch” of gravy. 1 lb sausage, 2 cups Milk, etc. rounding with butter or fat is necessary, I think. It sure is tasty and easy to make.
A little (or a lot!) white pepper and fennel for an authentic greasy spoon truck stop authentic diner experience. Sometimes called “4 calendar Cafe” quality.
Every time I see the title to this thread, my mind starts trying to come up with a recipe for a dish that could be called prick potatoes. The lazy part of me is against the idea of carving them into the obvious shape.
But I know that those potatoes need to be served with a white sauce.
Is fennel really typical? Sage, yes. But fennel puts me in mind of Italian sausage. I mean, it would work fine, I’m just not used to it. Then again, I’m a Yankee.
Speaking as a Yankee, i wouldn’t recognize “white gravy” as gravy, if i hadn’t been explicitly told it’s called that. I would have called it a white sauce.
There is very little overlap between the universes of people who who buy lean “sausage” and people who make sausage gravy. Just sayin’. Them as knows buys country sausage for breakfast purposes.
Hmm, i didn’t realize that “white sauce” was a specific thing. But you’re right, and it’s made with butter. I was just thinking “some random sauce that’s white”.
After watching a video, I see that “sausage” refers to sausage meat. In England, a sausage comes wrapped in a skin (originally intestines). In Scotland, it is more often a square patty.
Cream comes in three varieties: cream, double cream, or thickened. Milk comes as skimmed, semi-skimmed and full-fat. it can also be extra creamy, almost as fatty as cream.
Gravy over here is exclusively the brown sauce variety which can be made from scratch by adding water to the roasting pan and thickening it with a roux. More often it is instant, made with Bisto or other granules.
I mean, so many Cajun/Creole dishes start with a roux (I mean, that’s the joke about that sort of cooking: “First, you make a roux” as the start of every recipe). It’s not just gumbo.
What are your thoughts about pasta sauce being called “gravy” in certain quarters?
But, you’re right, as a Yankee, on first account I probably would not have called that a gravy. I’d probably call it a sausage sauce or sausage cream sauce or something like that. Maybe, just maybe, I’d call it a white-ish gravy with sausage in it, but more likely a sauce.
Well, now you’re getting into the French mother sauces, and that’s just a whole other universe. I have made them all at least once, as my Mother considered that a necessary part of my education. But they were not part of the “Southern Cooking” repertory. Perhaps they are in Louisiana, but this is Virginia.
Bechamel. But it doesn’t start with pan drippings. The roux for Bechamel is made with butter.
Eh, I think it’s OK. Just a little. A chicken bouillon cube or two is typical. Lots of black pepper. Some recipes suggest a small amount of freeze-dried coffee. Sort of one stop breakfast shopping. I also like Cayenne. I call it “3 pepper” Sausage gravy. I don’t make it regularly as I once did, it is pretty stout. Start adding in eggs - 3 or 4 poached, hash browns, side of bacon it starts bumping into the 4k calorie range. LOL.
Eh, I seem to remember (you kids get off my lawn!) when sausage was pretty fatty.
Hamburger is excellent around here generally, but it sort of seems the 70/30 or 80/20 or whatever is only loosely followed. Sometimes the meatloaf starts looking like a stew. Fat is tricky in that there needs to be enough, for flavor, though no more.
One thing I noticed, while most varieties of “milk” will work to make a “white sauce”, non-fat dry powdered is not a good choice. It’s pretty tough to improve on whole fresh milk as the base.
