Biscuits & Sausage Gravy

Over this fine holiday bender I’ve been focusing my efforts on fine-tuning some old holiday standards. More specifically, one old favorite, Biscuits & Gravy, the classic American panacea for all things over-indulged.

The efficacy of Biscuits & Gravy is derived from a three fold approach to the ailing body, mind & spirit, a trifecta of culinary resuscitation – the gravy, the grease & the flush.

• The gravy descends into your guts collecting the poisons
• The grease lubes your innertubes to keep that collection of poisons moving southways and
• The biscuit is your sweeper, your tried and true civic hero, an expanding plug of starch and texture literally scrubbing the intestine wall as it carries the poisons out to the crapper.

Too often people turn their nose up at Biscuits & Gravy and, honestly, I don’t blame them. Perhaps more than any singular American classic Biscuits & Gravy gets abused and underperformed by it’s instigators. Too many times do frozen biscuits and white starchy gravy get passed off as an answer to this rich, healing elixir.

But without fail I have converted every B&G ex-pat I’ve ever tried to convert. And this has far less to do with any artistry to the recipe or execution of the recipe I use and much more to do with a common sense respect for fat, salt, and the bloody need for a man to recover. And, of course, the archetypical perfection that is warm plate of Biscuits and Gravy.

The recipe is simple:

Bring a medium heat up on your skillet.
Add breakfast sausage (Jimmy Dean, other, or see below) and brown.
Once your sausage is cooked, leave it in the skillet and add a half stick of butter, let this brown.
(If you’re feeling froggy at this point add a diced up shallot and cook for a minute or two. This isn’t essential, but punches this recipe up from a 9 to an 11).
Once your butter is browned add about 1/3 – 1/2 cup of flour, let it soak up all the juices and adhere to your sausage.
Add in whole milk or half and half and mix in until you reach the consistancy you like.
Add salt, pepper and crushed red pepper to taste.
Add coffee grounds.
Serve over a whole biscuit (Pilsbury homemade is fine or see below) and top with an over easy egg or two.

I recommend serving this with a decent Bloody Mary or strong coffee and orange juice. Keep your robe on and make sure the couch is plenty comfy before starting your meal. Don’t fuck around. Life can be pretty important and morning is vital to the proper acuity for life.

As mentioned above, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been wrenching down my recipe with the intent of taking complete ownership of this the Alcoholic’s Life Vest. Of highest priority to that goal was to master a solid recipe for homemade biscuits. So, like any reputable modern master of his clarion will I sat down, righted my posture, and sent my intention out to the universe, which is to say I updated my Facebook status: “In search of the perfect homemade biscuit.”

Within a matter of minutes I had received an answer by way of Cara Ward who tipped me to Michael Ruhlman’s biscuit recipe from his book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. I can’t over state how awesome this book is, it takes classic recipes and breaks them down to their core elements, their core ratios, allowing each individual to then build from the elemental core of a recipe and develop flourishes of their own. And, after all, isn’t that what cooking is really about?

Now Ruhlman’s biscuits are of the flaky sort, a derivation of his pie crust and puff pastries. They’re delicious, but they are not quite what I want for my Biscuits and Gravy. So I decided to forego the layering technique he discusses, add a bit more butter milk to make them messy and chunky, and drop in just a bit of Parmesan cheese for flavor.

Here’s the recipe for 6 biscuits:

Preheat your oven to 400* and put your cast iron skillet in there.
Mix 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1 teaspoon of salt together.
Dice half or three quarters a stick of frozen butter into small cubes and mix into the dry mix with your hand.
Toss in a couple pinches of Parmesan.
Pour in 8oz of buttermilk and just mix until it’s combined.
Take your skillet out of the oven and plop slightly formed balls of biscuit dough onto it.
Cook for 30 minutes.

Ooh la la.

The last little piece of this puzzle comes in the form of making your own damn sausage. Sausage is super easy to make especially if you’ve got a Kitchen-Aid stand-up mixer and this awesome meat grinding attachment KitchenAid FGA Food Grinder Attachment for Stand Mixers. If you don’t have these just get a hand-cranked meat grinder or, better yet, think seriously about how to acquire the Kitchen-Aid. Getting the grinder is the hardest part of making your sausage after that just follow this simple recipe:

Cut up up 3lbs pork butt (make sure about a 1/2lb of that is fat) into small 1″ cubes and put in the freezer for about 30-45 minutes (this helps grinding it).
Grind that stuff up.
Mix together the meat with 1tbl salt, 1tsp sage, 1tsp black pepper, 1/2tsp thyme, 1/4tsp marjoram, 1/4tsp crushed red pepper and just a wee little bit of brown sugar and maybe some cloves if you’re feeling froggy.

That’s it. If you want to stuff this into natural casing all the more power to you, but, especially for B&G, you don’t need to. However, it is pretty sweet to see your own hand-made sausage stuffed into casing. If you’re going to stuff it, slather up your stuffer real good with lard and make sure you twist your casing back and forth as you thread it on, following the natural twists of the hog’s intestines.

Rightio!