![]() ![]() In other parts of the country, though, pork sausage options tend to sway Italian or are labeled “breakfast sausage” without much explanation. In the South, there is a much wider selection of sausages made with different herbs and seasonings available at grocery stores. That said, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and too much fat in the pan will produce a gravy that's greasy and broken-if your sausage releases ample fat, there's no need to top it up with butter. Many aroma molecules are fat-soluble, meaning much of the sausage’s flavor will render out into the pan with the liquefying fat, perfect for infusing the final gravy with rich, savory notes. The fat isn't just essential for the roux, it's also necessary for the taste of the gravy. Since it can be hard to know how much fat your sausage will yield when shopping at the market, I've added butter as an optional ingredient in this recipe, just in case your sausage is too lean and stingy on the fat. We also need sausage that's fatty enough to render sufficient grease to make the roux's signature paste. This maximizes the flour's liquid-thickening ability, as the longer it's toasted, the less effective of a thickener it becomes. ![]() It starts with the roux-how much starch you’re using, the kind of fat you use, how long you cook the flour in the fat, and how dark you want the roux to get-and continues on to the choice of liquid (milk? broth?) and seasonings.Ī traditional sawmill gravy uses milk as the liquid and involves making a white roux, which means we’re not allowing the fat and flour mixture to color at all. There are numerous factors that help determine the flavor and consistency of the final gravy. Why use a roux and not just dump plain flour into a liquid as it simmers? As Daniel wrote previously in his guide to roux, not only does cooking the raw flavor out of the starch lead to a better-tasting final dish, but it also coats each individual starch granule in fat, which “helps them disperse more evenly when combined with a liquid, like stock or milk,” reducing the risk of lumps. Most traditional Southern gravy recipes call for browning the sausage in butter, removing the meat with a slotted spoon, then leaving the fat behind in the pan to create a roux, a mixture of fat and flour used to thicken soups, stews, and sauces. Edge once commented to the New York Times that you’d be unlikely to find recipes for the dish “because the Midwestern and Southern cooks who are most expert at those dishes rely upon muscle memory for guidance not cookbooks.”)Īt its most basic, sausage gravy is a white sauce (or béchamel) made with drippings and other fats. Once a dish reserved for poor, working class communities, sausage gravy and biscuits can now be found within the pages of cookbooks and on restaurant menus across the country. The sauce-also known as sawmill gravy-was “the ideal cheap and calorie-dense fuel for sawmill workers lifting heavy logs all day long, and the perfect tool for making the era’s biscuits more palatable,” which were tougher and firmer than the biscuits of today. ![]() According to Washington Post writer Aaron Hutcherson, the dish became popular sometime in the late 1800s in Southern Appalachia. Made in a skillet with drippings, sausage gravy is creamy and savory and often served with tender, flaky biscuits for breakfast in the southern United States. The challenge was recreating my memory of those pitch-perfect versions in my own kitchen. I don’t find myself needing a hangover cure much these days, but I do still crave velvety, luscious sausage gravy spooned over warm biscuits. There was a time in my life when a plate of biscuits and gravy was my answer to a raging hangover, although, if I'm honest, it was often my southern friends who were battling through their own headaches to whip it up and I was the lucky recipient.
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