For this Southern breakfast you'll only need a few ingredients and a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.
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Biscuits & Gravy | Basic with Babish
Serious Eats / Amanda. Suarez
There was a time in my life when a plate of biscuits and gravy was my answer to a raging hangover although to be fair it was often my Southern friends struggling with their own headaches to make it and I was the lucky recipient. I don’t need hangover cures as often these days but I still crave velvety delicious sausage gravy poured over warm biscuits. The challenge was to recreate my memory of those perfect versions in my own kitchen. Sausage gravy made in a skillet with pan juices is creamy and savory and is often served with soft crispy biscuits for breakfast in the Southern United States. According to Washington Post writer Aaron Hutcherson the dish became popular in Southern Appalachia sometime in the late 1800s. The sauce also known as sawmill sauce was "the ideal cheap high-calorie fuel for sawmill workers who hauled heavy logs all day and the perfect tool for making the biscuits of the era more palatable" which were chewier and firmer than today's biscuits. Once a dish reserved for poor working-class communities sausage sauce and biscuits are now found in cookbooks and on restaurant menus across the country. (Though Southern writer John T. Edge once told the New York Times that you probably wouldn't find recipes for the dish "because the Midwestern and Southern cooks most adept at those dishes rely on muscle memory for guidance not cookbooks.")
At its most basic sausage gravy is a white sauce (or béchamel) made from gravy and other fats. Most traditional Southern gravy recipes call for browning the sausage in butter and removing the meat with a slotted spoon leaving the fat in the pan to create a roux a mixture of fat and flour used to thicken soups stews and sauces. Why use a roux instead of just throwing plain flour into a liquid as it simmers? As Daniel previously wrote in his roux guide cooking the raw flavor out of the starches not only results in a better-tasting final product but it also coats each individual starch grain with fat which “helps them disperse more evenly when combined with a liquid like broth or milk” reducing the risk of lumps. There are numerous factors that help determine the flavor and consistency of the final gravy. It starts with the roux: how much starch you use what kind of fat you use how long you cook the flour in the fat and how dark you want the roux to be. Then comes the choice of liquid (milk? stock?) and spices.
