How To Make Sausage Gravy, And Shave A Few Years Off Your Lifespan
Sausage gravy is deeply, deeply
disreputable food. In its typical presentation, slopped across biscuits
in some charmingly run-down roadside diner with Patsy Cline playing on
the jukebox, it is, in essence, flour on flour, dressed up as actual
sustenance by the inclusion of token quantities of butter and
pork—which, you may have noticed, are not exactly kale and lima
beans—and not-at-all-token quantities of salt and milkfat, which are
also not kale and lima beans.
When the
best that can be said of a foodstuff's nutritional virtue is that, hey,
rendered pork fat—one of its main ingredients—has, like, what, amino
acids or some shit, probably, or maybe riboflavin, I ain't no dietitian, get offa my case, I can eat what I want, maybe I don't want to live to see 55, didja ever consider that,
we can probably all agree that it ought not to be a staple food of the
non-suicidal. So no, don't, like, add it to your regular breakfast
rotation, or at least be aware that now that I have advised you against
doing that, that pretty much clears up my liability in this matter.
But, sure:
Make sausage gravy this one time, and then maybe whip it up once or
twice a year for a big Sunday breakfast or something, because damn, it's
really good. Rich and salty and good. And cheap! It's mostly flour and
low-grade meat products, after all, and while this certainly is bad news
for your person, it's good news for your wallet. You can have sausage
gravy, and then put the leftover money you otherwise would have spent on
a breakfast that contained actual life-sustaining nutriment into, say, a
brand-new treadmill. And/or a coronary angiogram. Worst-case scenario,
maybe a slightly fancier tombstone.
First, though, let's make some sausage gravy.
To begin, acquire sausage.
A pound of it should do. Decide for yourself what type of sausage you'd
like to use: The stuff labeled "breakfast sausage" is perfectly fine,
and so is Italian, provided it's the hot variety, though note also that
Mexican chorizo is outrageously good in sausage gravy. The only
requirements are that your sausage must be uncooked and uncased—if you
can only find the cased stuff, you'll need to remove the casing with a knife. Go ahead and do that. Man, is it gross.
Next, set your sausage aside for a bit and preheat your oven to 425 degrees, because you are making your own goddamn biscuits. Yes, you are.
Listen.
Here is the thing. There's a reason why the biscuit exists, and why
people eat it so often, and that reason is that the biscuit is delicious
and perfect and oh man, the biscuit. But there is also a subsidiary
reason why the biscuit exists and is so popular, and that reason
is that, as bready-type things go, the biscuit is absurdly easy to
make, and make well, which is to say well enough to cause your lips to
curl over your teeth and attempt to follow the biscuit down your throat,
just to be near it. And then you have to pull your lips back out of
your mouth with your fingers and tape them to your face, which maybe is
not exactly the sexiest look ever, but that's OK, because your stomach
is full of homemade biscuits, and that is for damn sure a hell of a lot
more important than whether or not they will let you board "the bus," if
that even is its real name.
And, since
the biscuit is so easy to make (really: You kinda just mix a bunch of
stuff in a bowl, fold it over a few times on your counter, and then cook
it), it's an easy thing to remove from the list of foodstuffs you must
depend upon The Faceless, Merciless All-Owning Mega-Corporation to
provide for you. Really. You can make your own biscuits. And then you
can shake them, defiantly, at the entrance of an Apple Store, for some
reason.
So. Make biscuit dough. There are many ways to make biscuit dough; you practiced one of them back when you made peach cobbler
(unless of course you heretofore failed to make peach cobbler, in which
case go to hell), and that's the basic formulation you'll deploy here,
too. In a bowl, whisk together two cups of flour, a tablespoon of baking
powder, a pinch of sugar, and two much heartier pinches of salt; cut a
cold stick of unsalted butter into small chunks and kinda pinch and
press and knead these into the dry ingredients until the mixture is
crumbly and lumpy, but doesn't contain any wads of butter larger than,
say, a pearl; gently stir in, oh, maybe a bit less than a cup of warm
(not hot) water or milk (but really: milk) until the contents of the
bowl just hang together as a dough. There. A dough.
And now, transform your dough into biscuits.
Sprinkle some flour on the countertop (yes, this will be messy; no, you
will not be able to summon the will to clean it before 2047; yes, the
end result will be worth it) and dump your dough onto it. With your
hands, press and pat and flatten this big dough heap until it's about as
thick as your index finger, fold it in half, and pat and press it down
again until it's about as thick as your thumb. Grab a round dough-cutter
(Ha! Psych. You will never possess one of these. Open, empty, and clean
out that ancient can of chicken-and-rice soup that has somehow followed
your family from residence to residence through the past three
generations, waiting for this moment, the moment of its usefulness,
quivering imperceptibly in anticipation of sweet, merciful annihilation
each time you opened the pantry door, and then sobbing to itself when
you yet again reached past it for the marshmallows, those trollops, damn them, but not this time, this time it is I, Chicken-And-Rice, who shall return triumphantly to The Void)
and cut out as many whole disks as you can; ball up and pat down the
remainder and cut disks out of that, too, then stash whatever's left in,
um, your mouth, of course, and quickly, while no one is looking.
Spread these dough-disks out on a big, flat cookie sheet with some parchment paper (or butter, or cooking spray, or whatever, no not socks) on it, stick the thing in your preheated oven, and bake your biscuits.
This one time, and only this one time, that is not a euphemism for
anything. They'll need about 15 minutes. This will give you plenty of
time to make sausage gravy. This is awfully easy.
Heat up a
skillet or saucier pan (stainless steel is best, here, but whatever
you've got will do just fine, unless it is an upturned fedora, in which
case why do you even own a fedora, it makes you look like a jerk) and brown your pound of uncased sausage over,
say, medium heat, breaking it up with a wooden spoon or spatula as it
cooks, until it's thoroughly browned and there aren't too many huge
crumbles in there. Once that's done, you'll need to move the browned sausage from the pan to a bowl
without losing the wonderful liquid pork fat that rendered out of it as
it cooked. If you have a slotted spoon for this, that's ideal, since
it'll leave that fat right there in the pan; if you don't have a slotted
spoon, you can pour the contents of the pan through a colander
suspended above a big bowl, so the sausage gets caught in the colander
and the fat runs through into the bowl, and then dump the fat back into
the pan. In any case, set the sausage aside for a minute, because you're gonna work with the fat.
So you've
got a big pan full of liquid pork fat, and isn't that just what you've
always wanted. Keep the heat under it at around medium, and whisk maybe a quarter of a cup of flour into the fat.
Whisk and whisk, until the pork fat is fully absorbed into the flour
and you have a smooth, consistent, lump-free flour-and-pork-fat paste
the very sight of which would cause your primary healthcare provider to
bury a large ax directly into your chest.
What you've done here, in essence, is to make a pork-fat roux,
the thickening agent used in the making of several traditional French
sauces. In fact, what you'll be doing next is turning this pork-fat roux into something like a quick pork-fat Béchamel
sauce, and maybe—once you retrieve your computer from the canyon into
which you reflexively pitched it at the sight of French cooking
terminology—this will make you feel somewhat better about using flour to
make biscuits and then using flour to make the gravy that will go atop
them, if your discomfort at preparing such extravagantly unhealthful
hobo-chow can be assuaged somewhat by associating it with fancy
cuisine-words, or if your general sense of bonhomie (oh God,
more French) can be buoyed by a reminder that we're all, all of us,
sausage-gravy-eating vagrants and pretentious French chefs alike, like,
the same on the inside, man, insofar as we all apparently contain both the desire to consume flour suspended in liquefied fat, and also, much of the time, large quantities of flour suspended in liquefied fat.
So your fat has flour in it and is a smooth, good-smelling paste. Whisking all the while, pour two cups of whole milk into the pan.
Whisk and whisk and whisk. Gradually, the flour in the pan will absorb
this milk, and the mixture will turn thick and bubbly, until it is very
thick and bubbly, and you go, "Oh, that's gravy." Now it is gravy. Stir that crumbled, cooked sausage into the gravy,
along with a very large amount of freshly ground black pepper, and
(tasting as you go) however much salt is required to make it good and
salty. Hey, now: That there is some goddamn sausage gravy. What are you
gonna do with it? You are gonna by-God eat it.
By now the biscuits should be done, or close to it. Get the biscuits out of the oven,
and let them sit and cool for a minute or two while you try not to dive
headlong into the sausage gravy. Then it will be time to cram all of
this stuff into yourself.
Split one
or two biscuits onto a plate and scoop a heaping, messy, ludicrous
portion of sausage gravy atop them. You are of course free to stop there
and proceed to the eating portion of the affair, but!—the right thing
to do, the just thing, the humane thing, is to quickly prepare two or
three over-easy fried eggs, and place these atop the sausage gravy, so
that when you puncture their yolks with a fork (or, should you wish to
perish as soon as possible, some bacon), the runny yellow goodness will
ooze down and mingle with the sausage gravy and align the planets and
bring about an Age Of Peace that will last only as long as it takes you
to wolf this rich, hearty, heavy, salty, impossibly satisfying meal down
with glazed, slavering, primal intensity, and drift promptly into a
deep and blissful coma.
Enjoy the rest. Oh man, are you gonna have to do a lotta friggin' jumping jacks when you wake up.
Eat what you want and die like a man.
ReplyDelete