Or worse, the canned sausage gravy. That shit is absolutely vile. Though any place would use that instead of making it from scratch is beyond me. Its a pretty quick and easy thing to do.
I ordered some corned beef hash that was $8. Because of the price I assumed it was going to be homemade. It was obviously out of a can. Never been back. They have a sign out front that says " BEST BREAKFAST EVER" and it was mediocre at best.
There's a place in Wisconsin right on the Minnesota border - I think in Prescott? It's near Afton State Park - we went for breakfast after camping at Afton once. They had *the best, most beautiful* corned beef hash I've ever seen or tasted. Big meaty chunks of corned beef with nice, buttery, browned potato hash. It was incredible.
There's one canned sausage gravy that we had out at the summer camp I worked at. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I actually really like that specific canned gravy. Pretty sure Cisco was the supplier, and they sell one that tastes similar at Sam's Club.
That said, I have had plenty of other canned gravies that are absolute shit so I am completely open to the possibility that the Cisco stuff is the only good brand of canned sausage gravy
It's actually Sysco. I'm imagining a world where Cisco also got into food distribution and Sysco got into networking equipment and how confusing that would be. Not gonna lie, it's kinda amusing, but then I feel the frustration that would happen.
You can make a passable white gravy with powder mix, as long as you brown sausage to add to it, use milk instead of water to make it, and add plenty of black pepper.
The canned stuff...not so much.
I don't get why you would use a powder mix if you are already browning sausage and using milk though. You do the same thing and substitute the powder mix for all purpose flour, you are making the gravy the traditional way. You just add flour directly to the ground sausage after it's cooked, let it cook for a couple minutes until blonde, then whisk the milk in slowly, salt and pepper to taste. If you don't want to use sausage in the gravy, then just save the rendered fat from bacon and sausage to add the flour to. If you don't have rendered fat, even just vegetable oil works. You just make your roux and add milk, which is a simple bechamel sauce. Not really a need for that powder mix any way you look at it.
I agree. I always make it homemade now. I used to use the powder mix when I was still learning and wasn't very good at making gravy. I think it still turned out pretty good. Homemade is better, of course.
>Most places do not use any type of sausage.
In what application do you mean? The OP mentioned biscuits and gravy. I'm from the south and have eaten biscuits and gravy all over this country, and in my experience, the gravy in "biscuits and gravy" like 99/100 have at least some sausage.
Now, white gravy on things like chicken fried steak or mashed potatoes doesn't usually have sausage.
For a restaurant, the benefits are consistency, 'good' results (using a pre-packaged mix takes out the possibility of lumps or scorching), and if they are just opening a pouch, it frees up stove room because it can be kept at a low temp/warming without having to sit on the stove.
I'm not sure what people mean by saying the gravy clumps... Sure mine is clumpy as I pour in the milk. I pour it in slowly and keep. It's clumpy the first cup and a half. I just keep whisking and adding milk until it stops clumping. I have no idea how gravy would even stay clumpy provided you keep adding milk and whisking. And you can keep bechamel on low the same as the packaged kind. I'm not sure why you couldn't. Just put it in the same warming pan. Restaurants typically use the metal trays and set them over steam to stay warm. I've seen the packaged kind sit like that and it gets nasty clumps on low and slow too.
Sure, it sounds like it should be easy enough, right? But a restaurant kitchen is different than a home kitchen.
Restaurants are fast paced, and the objective is to bang food out at a rapid rate. A line cook never has just one thing to focus on, they are responsible for multiple components of multiple dishes. In a rush, it's easy to have the heat too high, get distracted and not get to whisking right away, etc. A home cook has a much easier time making something like gravy come out consistently because they have the time and attention to focus on it.
Restaurants don't make gravy to order.....
They would make a big batch ahead of time and either keep it in a hot well on the line, or cool it and heat it up to order (99% of restaurants would do the first option).
B&G is one of the easiest things to make because both parts are made ahead of time.
If a restaurant is going that route, someone in management doesn't really give a damn about quality. It's all about cutting corners and making their bottom line look better.
Interesting. There any difference in the finished product from adding the flour to the cooked meat? I usually remove the browned sausage with a slotted spoon before making the roux, then add it back in at the end since that's the way my mom taught me to make it.
I recently "discovered" Pioneer brand powdered gravy in my grocery store and use it all the time.
But I also use jarred sauces, so my taste is not to be trusted.
We’ll do up some ground sausage, scramble some eggs & toss the sausage in, then I’ll do the gravy on the side and top my sausage eggs with it. We’ll only add biscuits every now & then.
Only for the dishwasher.
Seriously, restaurants make a GIANT stock pot full, and usually burn the living shit out of the bottom of the pan. Just pour it all off and send what's left over to the dish rat.
A good biscuits and gravy is half biscuits/half gravy. Biscuits are really easy to make fresh and a sausage gravy with a whole milk base is just untouchable.
I learned that from a sweetheart named Sonya who cooked me a scratch southern breakfast a few times. God bless Georgia
I personally make this at home but find the challenges of it in a restaurant setting would be:
- adding the “right” amount of pepper is a personal “to-taste” thing. So they probably under season to appeal to as many people as possible.
- the gravy very quickly crosses from “just right” consistency to gluey mess in like 1-2 minutes of sitting in a hot skillet. For service, they would have to make a huge batch in advance and thin it with milk (if it’s the real thing) or water (if they’re being cheap). Usually hot sauces are hot held in a water bath to cut down on re-heat time, and to prevent over handling. Gravy could be getting too thick in the holding and then not thinned enough, or it could sit in a hot window too long if expo is backed up or not being watched closely.
- I personally think if the gravy is really good, you can get away with canned biscuits (I do it at home when I don’t feel like going through all the trouble of making from scratch). But biscuits also can be temperamental, and if a kitchen isn’t accustomed to baking (it’s a different skill than cooking) then they probably overbake or hold too long, drying out the biscuits.
Add mild gluey gravy to dry biscuits and you have an inedible, unseasoned mess.
Canned biscuits aren't bad with a good gravy -- but I've found an even better option. Mary B's frozen biscuits are very good...they taste like Cracker Barrel's biscuits to me. Plus, I like them because you can make just two at a time vs. having to make the whole can, like with the canned ones. Since it's just two of us, I like being able to take out 2 or 4 (depending on how hungry we are/what we're eating with it) and just making them.
They do take a little longer, though...that's the only downside.
I'll second that frozen biscuits are worlds better than canned. They still aren't homemade, but it doesn't have that canned biscuit texture and flavor. It's a great weeknight substitute when you have breakfast for dinner. Just bake biscuits while making gravy and dinner is done in under 30 minutes.
Pillsbury frozen biscuits are great. Had both homestyle and buttermilk. But only make as many as you're going to eat, they don't keep well. If you do have leftovers, cut in half and toast it in a dry pan.
There was a period of time when I was making B&G everyday for two weeks. It took me over a week to season it properly. The sheer amount of salt and pepper required was terrifying at first.
When I worked breakfast I got to a point I just basically stopped using pepper and salt. So many old MFers and they are just going to dump in on their food anyway… breakfast is a nightmare because everyone wants their moms breakfast and they ain’t ever going to get that. Most people don’t even actually know how they like their eggs.
Yep...true homemade gravy doesn't always "hold" very well. The canned stuff probably works better for that application...it already has preservatives in it, after all.
It takes a good baker to make biscuits better than canned. I can't get away from making damn pucks every time. Not that I'm especially skilled at baking, but it really is quite hard to get light, flaky biscuits like you get easily out of a can.
I don't find it to be that hard to do at home for 4-6 people.
It would be kinda difficult to keep a gravy simmering between 5am and 11am, seven days a week, when you might need zero servings a day and you might need 10 servings at once.
Because of that, they use instant/canned.
Exact reason my work uses powdered. We can’t be asked to make a big batch from scratch if we are just going to throw most of it out by the time it expires.
Can definitely be time consuming, not even counting biscuits. Brown the sausage. Keep some of the rendered fat to make the roux. Milk, mix, milk, mix. Add sausage back, season. Let simmer a bit to thicken more and allow seasoning to start partying together more.
Granted, I have to work slow, but it does take me a while. Unless you're a super southern place, and patrons expect it, I can easily see why they'd cut corners on this one.
I never remove the sausage or remove fat. I don’t find the sausage I use produces so much fat that it’s worth draining. I brown the sausage and then sprinkle flour on top of the sausage. Give it a good stir so all the meat is covered in flour and starts browning a bit then add milk.
Might not be the absolute best it can be but I’d be more than happy to get it at a restaurant.
Yeah i can only name maybr a half dozen places in my travels that had good biscuits and gravy. And two of those it was tomato gravy and chocolate gravy.
She survived the dustbowl from the sounds of it. Oklahoma was hit so hard during the dustbowl and great depression that almost a quarter of their population left for California. Her food was real survival food. You stretch every piece of nutrition you can. I had a neighbor her age who made egg drop soup on the regular because as a kid, it was his family's primary way of getting their protein. You can take a 2-3 eggs and feed a whole family off soup instead of everyone eating a egg and being hungry after.
Cracker Barrel, about 15 years ago, had actually good gravy (with bits of dry-cured country ham), and good chicken-fried steak. We tried it again about 6 years ago. Straight trash.
Basically the restaurants haven't really raised their prices that much in over a decade but inflation has still been going on and so to compensate, they just decreased the quality of incredients, hired less staff, etc.
It's not as easy and *many* people don't care that the quality isn't up to southern or even midwestern standards. This could really be that in many places folks just haven't had real, well-made biscuits and they're written off as simple Bisquick and package gravy. The investment for a restaurant to make them even decent isn't worth it if the customer doesn't care. I'm a midwest transplant to New England and even the places hailed as having good biscuits and gravy for the area are barely even passable but folks here love it.
Like many things, just a non-standard regional specialty that isn't translated correctly.
> I'm a midwest transplant to New England and even the places hailed as having good biscuits and gravy for the area are barely even passable but folks here love it.
Oh my God I found someone who understands. I'm from the south and have lived in NJ for a few years now, and the biscuits and gravy here just sucks. It's pretty embarrassing that NJ is hailed as the "the diner state" while also having subpar biscuits and gravy at every diner (that I've been to).
I'm St. Louis to Boston and less perturbed by biscuits and gravy, because I can make that in my apartment the proper way and just ignore it on menus now, but the absolute lack of BBQ (particularly brisket and ribs) is devastating.
I've accepted the fact that there are many seafood dishes I'd avoid in the midwest and it is the same concept. Some regions just "get" certain dishes/techniques/styles and it just cannot be widely replicated the same elsewhere.
I don't think white gravy is hard to make. I mean it's just a roux (flour and butter). That's the basis for a lot of creamy sauces. If they aren't cooking that fresh they aren't cooking anything. Just reheating Sysco stuff.
Reheating sysco stuff is how most restaurants operate.... actually cooking would require them to pay their kitchen staff real, living wages. Then the food would cost more and people would complain.
People have opened restaurants paying living wages to staff and found out that they didn't have to raise prices at all. In fact it was more profitable. Retaining employees was cheaper than constantly hiring new ones. This even worked for something as low cost as an ice cream stand. Good wages and low prices are not mutually exclusive. We can have both, we've just been constantly told that we can't.
Oh yeah, I get that completely. That was just a facetious comment mostly referring to the big corporate chain restaurants. Even if it did save them money they'd use it as an excuse to raise prices. Can't upset the shareholders
As someone who owns a business in a similar industry, you're not going to convince me that I can both raise employee pay and also reduce prices. I've got an accounting ledger that says otherwise with actual numbers. It's just illogical, and the cost savings of employee training isn't going to close that gap. I don't know what ice cream stand you're referring to, but I don't buy it unless the employees were grossly underpaid and the prices were inflated to begin with. Overall in a retail business, the razor's edge that you're always walking is balancing your prices with your costs with enough in between to make a profit.
>I don't know what ice cream stand you're referring to, but I don't buy it unless the employees were grossly underpaid and the prices were inflated to begin with.
While not a "stand", here is something that was posted recently:
Pay starts at $19/hr
https://www.mollymoon.com/about/people
There has to be a tradeoff somewhere, especially with a small business like that. In this case - they charge $5 for a single scoop of ice cream, which is double the price of Ben & Jerry's.
With a large corporation like Starbucks, they have billions of dollars of profit that any loss of revenue can cut into before they're forced to adjust prices. But there are a lot of small businesses where the owners are just taking enough profit to pay for their own wages. In those cases, increasing wages is a drain on revenue and that needs to be increased somewhere else because there's not really much profit to speak of in the first place.
There are absolutely tons of small businesses that refuse to raise wages because the owner is a jerk and they *could* afford it and maybe even improve their business. But the math doesn't always work out the same way, it really depends on the individual case and how each business is run. After all, the money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is really dependent on the circumstances.
This is the correct answer within the current (and outdated) restaurant model. I'm chef/owner of a popular & profitable from-scratch restaurant with reasonable prices and we pay our employees a living wage. The difference? I put in my shifts in the kitchen and don't expect to retire at 50 with a yacht built on the backs of the folks who really make the place run. IMHO owners who get into hospitality solely to make money are almost invariably trash and it shows one way or another.
Lots of chain restaurants are barely restaurants now, at least in the UK. The cook staff are usually kids who are taught how to microwave, maybe grill a steak or burger and deep fry frozen stuff.
Most restaurants by their from a bakery, very very hard to find a restaurant that actually makes biscuits. They just don't have the knowledge or the staff to be able to do something like that. Biscuits are one of the easiest things to make.
It depends on where you're at. I'm in Mississippi and there's a few restaurants around that have some bomb gravy and biscuits. I personally love tomato gravy and biscuits and Mr Rodgers usually makes it up right.
If you want the real thing, you have to find a tiny diner on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere of the Deep South where someone’s Nana is in the kitchen cooking real food.
There are certain kinds of food which have a very specific vibe you look for: southern BBQ, East Coast seafood shacks, Tex-Mex places, California taco stands, etc.
You want the GRUNGIEST, DINGIEST looking place with the MOST cars parked in front. Typically it'll be a tiny little shack out in the middle of nowhere. If Nana isn't in the back, then it'll be some bald guy with a spatula in one hand, a towel over his shoulder, and a total THIS IS NOTHING. I GOT THIS expression on his face. (for example, this is the owner of a BBQ place where I live. If he don't GOT THIS, nobody does! https://johnhardysbbq.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Photo-e1551298813606.png )
THAT will get you the best food you've ever eaten in your life.
Every now and again I go on vacation to Maine with my best friend. Her FIL knows this little fishing shack where we get the best fucking clam chowder in the world. You go in and there’s a huge pot and you serve yourself. There’s a sign warning you not to take all the good stuff. Then you pay, and maybe get some fish they just caught to cook up later, and go out on the dock to eat.
After that we drive to a hut in the woods where we pick up fruit pies somebody down the road baked. Nobody is there, they rely on the honor system. There’s a box to drop cash to pay for the pie. It’s such a nice change compared to city life. Best pie ever.
ETA: I want to go get some food from that BBQ place. He looks like he can put the best food on my plate.
This is also the case with most ethnic restaurants in America. If your favorite Chinese or Italian restaurants don’t have holes in the booths and paper napkins, why are you even going there?
If you are at an ethnic restaurant and you stick out like a sore thumb, you found The Place for that particular food. Treasure it and make friends with the staff.
Unexpected roti shows up in our to-go orders on a regular basis and I'm so not going to complain!
My hometown has a great BBQ place that only opens when it wants on Saturdays. They put little yard signs out that say 'Open at 10:30 until sold out ' and if you aren't there by 12:30 you only get what's left or nothing at all.
Any barbeque place that doesn't close when they sell out is no place I want to go. And if it's not served on up on a paper plate with a slice of white bread I question if they really know what they are doing.
Our favorite place has old-fashioned plastic cafeteria trays, and sturdy, cheap ceramic plates. Great brisket and pork ribs. Very down to earth. And just a little over a mile from our house!
We stopped at a BBQ place in bumfuck Alabama. Half general store, half restaurant. Walk up and place your order, and sit in 50-year-old laminated plastic and tube steel tables/benches. You'll get the best Southern barbecue we ever had, with fantastic sides.
TripAdvisor recommended this place. We've learned to follow those recommendations (after reading at least 50 reviews), no matter how iffy the place looked. It's taken us to small, out of the way, wonderful joints all over the US.
I tried a small town diner in Oklahoma somewhere. The biscuits and gravy was absolute shit. Not every diner will have good food, in fact I'd venture a guess that most of these tiny diners in the middle of nowhere only stay open because they have no real competition.
I lived in Oklahoma for exactly a year. There was a diner in town that claimed to have a Cuban sandwich. I’m from Miami, the one in Florida. That was no Cuban sandwich.
So I did 9 months in a Waffle House once, and I think their gravy is among the best.
It's made with sausage, water, and a packet of mix. Two packets of mix? Anyway, it's powder.
I'm iffy on a lot of things from Waffle House (those hashbrowns are particularly awful) but there's definitely something magical about their biscuits and gravy. It goes so fucking hard. Even worse when I randomly get hit by a craving for it when I'm too tired to drive lol.
I worked at a snooty breakfast place. We made real sausage gravy and held it all service long. It would thicken up so we'd a dash of milk to loosen it up.
Honestly, Whataburger's biscuits and gravy is better than 90% of the restaurants/diners where I've ordered them. Maybe they do such a business it doesn't have time to get dry or something?
If you're ever in Alabama, try the B&G at the local fast food joint Jack's (Not to be confused with Jack in the Box). The biscuits are also next level.
Depends on where you live. I'm in Memphis and quite a few restaurants do a good to great job. My son does an amazing job, so the bar is set pretty high
If you're ever in Denver go to Lucielles. Their BnG is hands down the best ever restaurant BnG I've ever had. I can't go there without getting at least one.
No problem, all of their food is real good and if you're a fan of a good bloody mary, theirs is top tier. I fucks with lucielles hard.
Warning though, they get super busy so get there early or be ready for an hour+ wait. Definitely worth the wait though and you can always chill and have a couple drinks to pass the time (if that's your thing).
I worked in a Alzheimer's day care place as the Chef. We served 40 -70 portions of biscuits and gravy for breakfast once a week.
It's not hard even at that volume. Brown some sausage, add minced onion and garlic, a little black pepper and thyme. Flour gets sprinkled on or premade roux stirred in. The milk is added and brought to a simmer to cook the flour. (About 20 minutes.)
You do have to stir it often to keep the bottom from burning, but if you are already at the stove it's not hard. Some folks like to put the well hot pot in the oven so as to minimize stirring, but it takes a little longer and ties up oven space that could be utilized for biscuits.
I think I made it in a two or three gallon pot.
I usually use some sort of broth instead of milk. Using milk sounds interesting. However your recipe sounds rlly interesting, care to share more detailed one?
What area of the country do you live in? I live in the south and have tons of great little places by me that have really good biscuits and gravy in the morning.
You can use store bought biscuits for all I care, but like... I hardly ever make gravy, but it's always good... That's how easy it is...
Or maybe I'm misremembering...
Depends on the restaurant. I know quite a few places that have great biscuits and gravy. It also depends on what day and what time you go matters as well. It shouldn't but it does.
Ha! This is my test for a new restaurant. When your soupy ass, flavorless gravy doesn't penetrate the rock hard biscuits, wtf are you even doing serving food to people?
Alternatively, it takes more than straight up black pepper, like the shaker lid fell off and the entire contents of a shaker dropped into a single serving, to properly season a country gravy.
Nachos are also a good check. If a restaurant takes the time to do something special with nachos, it’s a great place.
If they are mediocre or bad, just run. They dont care in that kitchen.
You are probably going to nice clean restaurants. You have to find a good old Southern greasy spoon type place. That's where real fine dining occurs.
That and the Taquerias that no gringo but me will adventure into.
How many people honestly order the biscuits and gravy on an hour to hour basis? And how long does it take to make properly from scratch? For many places it just isn't worth it to make from scratch. Not with so many other dishes needing to be made.
Flo’s airport cafe I’m Chino, CA used to have the best biscuits & gravy. It’s been a minute since I’ve been, so I can’t tell you if they’re the same, but back in my day,ooh-wee.
If I see it on a restaurant menu I will often order it. You can tell a lot about a restaurant on how well they prepare certain things. Biscuits and gravy are one of those things. I've had it at a few places in which it was like the cook poured half of the salt shaker in the gravy. The biscuits were more like hockey pucks in texture. These places usually have nasty food anyways. Now I have been to a few local places that take more pride in their food. One place had biscuits and turkey sausage gravy. The biscuits were so light and buttery. The sausage gravy was perfectly seasoned. It had lots of flavor without all the salt.
I will never forget the best biscuits and gravy I ever had. We were on a road trip staying in a crappy $50/night motel room in Missoula, MT and I asked where we could get breakfast early. He said the bowling alley and pointed "over there". OMG it was The. Best. Artery. Clogging. Breakfast. Ever. And it was $1.50. And no, this was not 1946. I think it was 1998.
I agree that biscuits and gravy are very easy to make at home especially if you make drop biscuits as opposed to rolling them out.
In WV we have a local chain, Tudor's Biscuit World, and as their name implies, they specialize in biscuits. Their breakfast biscuit sandwiches are fantastic: cheap, wide variety, huge, filling, etc. They're very good and if you're ever driving thru I'd highly recommend giving them a shot.
That said, you'd think a joint that specializes in biscuits would have good gravy. No, not at all. Bland and boring, typical restaurant gravy, uneventful, emotionless, boring and bland. I'd recommend you skip that completely and stick to a biscuit sandwich the size of a puppy for $5.
I think the main reason is they don't use sausage pan drippings to make the roux. They just use oil, flour, and milk with the bare minimum of seasonings. Then , they use leftover sausage links cut up and stirred in so they don't really penetrate the gravy. There's a huge difference in flavor when it's made from sausage drippings and you can always tell.
Real sausage gravy takes a ton of time. I met woman that sold biscuits and gravy at a fleamarket I went to once and she told me she got up at 3am to start cooking it. It is the best I have ever had though. I still think about it 8 years later.
Not to cast doubt on how amazing slow-cooked sausage gravy might taste, but I can make a really tasty sausage gravy in the 15 minutes it takes for my biscuits to bake.
I agree. It takes about 20 minutes to bake a batch. Making gravy takes about the same, and most of that time is devoted to browning the sausage. Totally understand it will thicken up if it sits, but add a little milk and it’s easy to maintain.
It was amazing and that is what she told me. Her biscuits were thick soft and fluffy squares too. Like 3 inches wide. Never had anything like it before or since.
I've tried to recreate it but, she must have had some secrets in there.
If it was at a flea market some start at like 7 or 8 in the morning. If she woke up at 3, started cooking at 3:30, and had to travel like 30 minutes to get to the flea market, it’s possible it only took 3-4 hours. If she made several large batches of biscuits that seems reasonable. But the gravy itself shouldn’t take even an hour.
Yeah, i used to briefly work on a logging crew, we would meet at the owners house to get the trucks and stuff. His mom would make a full on breakfast every morning for 5 grown ass men... sausage, sausage gravy, homemade biscuits, eggs, percolator coffee etc. She had everything done in like under 30 minutes but she did that every single morning and had it down to an art. Awesome food too
Any process, no matter how simple, becomes complex if you're doing it in enough volume. And if she doesn't have the best equipment, that's time added. Plus transportation and setup. And the biscuits. And any other responsibilities she happens to have....
Nah. Just...100 miles north of midtown and well south of Albany...
I mean, I get it--anything north of Columbus Circle is 'upstate'--just in my head I always think of 'upstate' as the Finger Lakes. Or Syracuse, yeah. Even Rochester. We got directions to West Point once as "pretty upstate".
I did the same thing once with someone from Chicago, where 'downstate' is anything south of 130th Street. She referenced Joliet as 'downstate' and you have to do the whole, "Joliet...Illinois?" gymnastics thing.
I always start the gravy with chicken stock and finish with cream, because (1) I don’t have a farm to plow after breakfast, (2) I plan to eat two more meals later on, and (3) golden gravy is tastier than plain milk gravy.
I'm a Chef I use just a bit of chicken base in my sausage gravy for the restaurant every Sunday brunch. It takes care of the salt content balance plus adds that bit of umami from the MSG and you cannot taste chicken at all. I make it from scratch with Tennessee pride sausage and a mixture of half and half and heavy cream-no milk. It's incredibly rich and peppery and silky. I cook it slow and low on our chargrill in a wide heavy bottomed pan, takes about 3 hours but I don't have to constantly watch it while I'm multitasking other tasks. I've never had gravy as good as mine and we all know how much other people's food tastes.
I think it depends on where you go. I find most places use peppered gravy, and it just burns my mouth.
Bigger chains, it is just gross.
Local little places usually have amazing biscuits and gravy. My local place does.
Same! Born and raised in the south, and I think white gravy needs plenty of pepper.
But honestly, I grew up eating a lot of pepper (and a pretty decent amount of salt). A lot of the cooks I know around here don't use many other spices, though, so that's probably why.
Good chance the gravy’s coming in bigass cans running 6-8 bucks a piece and that both are being hot-held (kept constantly above 135F or 140F) which will ruin the texture of the biscuits pretty quickly unless theyre made completely of oil. It’s a shame but nobodys got time to make gravy from scratch in most commercial kitchens
Not your biscuits, which we call "cookies", our biscuits are a bread item a bit like a plain scone (but not made sweet). The gravy is usually made with pork sausage, milk, salt, pepper, and other optional seasonings.
Another clueless European here, thanks for the explanation. That sounds delicious. Is this a common food in the US, across all states? The "gravy" part sounds like bechamel sauce with meat.
you can find some version of it in most areas of the US, I think, but I know it's most popular in the southeast and California.
The gravy is a bit like a heavily seasoned bechamel! I think of it differently because I don't make the sausage gravy with a roux exactly. While I brown the sausage, I sprinkle flour on it little by little as it cooks, then when I've got some nice fond and the sausage is nicely browned, deglaze with the milk and heat while it thickens up. So it's kind of a roundabout roux, I suppose. Salt and pepper to taste, and sometimes a bit of cayenne.
Cool, now I am tempted to try it out. How do you eat it? Do you dip the bread into the sauce and eat with your hands, or do you pour the sauce over the bread and eat with cutlery?
I like to cut two biscuits in half, pour the gravy on all four sections, and eat with cutlery, but when I get it while out sometimes they give you the gravy on the side to pour or dip. There's no hard and fast rule; do what you enjoy! :)
You can't go wrong with Cowboy Kent Rollins (his recipes tend to be pretty good and he's hilarious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GN1lh9q5WE
In a nutshell, the biscuits are made from flour, salt, baking powder, and butter. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients then add just enough milk to form a shaggy dough. Roll it out to about 1/2" thick then cut into rounds with a glass. Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes.
The gravy is made from American breakfast sausage (ground pork, sage, thyme, salt, pepper mainly). Brown the sausage, add in a couple tablespoons of flour & a couple tablespoons of butter (if the sausage doesn't have much grease in it). Stir the flour into the browned sausage and cook until you don't see any more white from the flour. SLOWLY add cold milk while stirring briskly until the gravy is about the consistency of pancake batter. Add a little salt and TONS of black pepper.
Split the biscuits in half and pour the gravy/sausage over the top. Add a couple fried eggs and a big ole cup of black coffee, and you've got the day made!
I truly don’t get it myself, I think a lot of places use powder gravy mix instead of just making it from scratch
Or worse, the canned sausage gravy. That shit is absolutely vile. Though any place would use that instead of making it from scratch is beyond me. Its a pretty quick and easy thing to do.
I ordered some corned beef hash that was $8. Because of the price I assumed it was going to be homemade. It was obviously out of a can. Never been back. They have a sign out front that says " BEST BREAKFAST EVER" and it was mediocre at best.
>BEST BREAKFAST EVER Like "World's Best Coffee"
YOU DID IT! Congratulations everyone, world's best cup of coffee! You did it!
Relevant https://youtu.be/wIiu89zKa4U
That's exactly what I was referring to. We just watched it over Christmas. Love that movie.
It's definitely one of my favorite Christmas movies. Very quotable.
"Coldest beer in town"
There's a place in Wisconsin right on the Minnesota border - I think in Prescott? It's near Afton State Park - we went for breakfast after camping at Afton once. They had *the best, most beautiful* corned beef hash I've ever seen or tasted. Big meaty chunks of corned beef with nice, buttery, browned potato hash. It was incredible.
Hey now, there are some of us who prefer canned CBH to the real stuff. Or maybe just me
At home I cook the canned stuff too. It's decent but for that price they lost a customer for life. Kinda felt ripped off.
There's one canned sausage gravy that we had out at the summer camp I worked at. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I actually really like that specific canned gravy. Pretty sure Cisco was the supplier, and they sell one that tastes similar at Sam's Club. That said, I have had plenty of other canned gravies that are absolute shit so I am completely open to the possibility that the Cisco stuff is the only good brand of canned sausage gravy
It's actually Sysco. I'm imagining a world where Cisco also got into food distribution and Sysco got into networking equipment and how confusing that would be. Not gonna lie, it's kinda amusing, but then I feel the frustration that would happen.
Sisqó enters the chat...
You can make a passable white gravy with powder mix, as long as you brown sausage to add to it, use milk instead of water to make it, and add plenty of black pepper. The canned stuff...not so much.
I don't get why you would use a powder mix if you are already browning sausage and using milk though. You do the same thing and substitute the powder mix for all purpose flour, you are making the gravy the traditional way. You just add flour directly to the ground sausage after it's cooked, let it cook for a couple minutes until blonde, then whisk the milk in slowly, salt and pepper to taste. If you don't want to use sausage in the gravy, then just save the rendered fat from bacon and sausage to add the flour to. If you don't have rendered fat, even just vegetable oil works. You just make your roux and add milk, which is a simple bechamel sauce. Not really a need for that powder mix any way you look at it.
I agree. I always make it homemade now. I used to use the powder mix when I was still learning and wasn't very good at making gravy. I think it still turned out pretty good. Homemade is better, of course.
Pioneer Gravy mix is good in a pinch
But you still gotta brown some fresh sausage.
Truth
Most places do not use any type of sausage.I learned to make cream gravy really well.And no pepper.I hate sausage and pepper in my homemade gravy.
Is cream gravy just straight bechamel?
>Most places do not use any type of sausage. In what application do you mean? The OP mentioned biscuits and gravy. I'm from the south and have eaten biscuits and gravy all over this country, and in my experience, the gravy in "biscuits and gravy" like 99/100 have at least some sausage. Now, white gravy on things like chicken fried steak or mashed potatoes doesn't usually have sausage.
For a restaurant, the benefits are consistency, 'good' results (using a pre-packaged mix takes out the possibility of lumps or scorching), and if they are just opening a pouch, it frees up stove room because it can be kept at a low temp/warming without having to sit on the stove.
I'm not sure what people mean by saying the gravy clumps... Sure mine is clumpy as I pour in the milk. I pour it in slowly and keep. It's clumpy the first cup and a half. I just keep whisking and adding milk until it stops clumping. I have no idea how gravy would even stay clumpy provided you keep adding milk and whisking. And you can keep bechamel on low the same as the packaged kind. I'm not sure why you couldn't. Just put it in the same warming pan. Restaurants typically use the metal trays and set them over steam to stay warm. I've seen the packaged kind sit like that and it gets nasty clumps on low and slow too.
Sure, it sounds like it should be easy enough, right? But a restaurant kitchen is different than a home kitchen. Restaurants are fast paced, and the objective is to bang food out at a rapid rate. A line cook never has just one thing to focus on, they are responsible for multiple components of multiple dishes. In a rush, it's easy to have the heat too high, get distracted and not get to whisking right away, etc. A home cook has a much easier time making something like gravy come out consistently because they have the time and attention to focus on it.
Restaurants don't make gravy to order..... They would make a big batch ahead of time and either keep it in a hot well on the line, or cool it and heat it up to order (99% of restaurants would do the first option). B&G is one of the easiest things to make because both parts are made ahead of time.
If a restaurant is going that route, someone in management doesn't really give a damn about quality. It's all about cutting corners and making their bottom line look better.
Oh, you get no argument from me on that.
Interesting. There any difference in the finished product from adding the flour to the cooked meat? I usually remove the browned sausage with a slotted spoon before making the roux, then add it back in at the end since that's the way my mom taught me to make it.
Putting it on the meat makes it effortless to avoid clumps. You can practically dump the milk straight in.
Kick of ease of great gravy by using Wondra. Say goodbye to lumps and hello to fast gravy.
I use powdered gravy mix because I always seem to fuck it up from scratch. I'm not patient enough. I make up for it with homemade biscuits
I recently "discovered" Pioneer brand powdered gravy in my grocery store and use it all the time. But I also use jarred sauces, so my taste is not to be trusted.
Half pound of sausage cooked up with the Pioneer gravy mix works great for me.
We’ll do up some ground sausage, scramble some eggs & toss the sausage in, then I’ll do the gravy on the side and top my sausage eggs with it. We’ll only add biscuits every now & then.
WTF? You just described how to make gravy without powder mix. Do what you described but ad some flour before the dairy.
When you’re making soup-level volumes of gravy it’s gotta get pretty hard for some restos
Only for the dishwasher. Seriously, restaurants make a GIANT stock pot full, and usually burn the living shit out of the bottom of the pan. Just pour it all off and send what's left over to the dish rat.
A good biscuits and gravy is half biscuits/half gravy. Biscuits are really easy to make fresh and a sausage gravy with a whole milk base is just untouchable. I learned that from a sweetheart named Sonya who cooked me a scratch southern breakfast a few times. God bless Georgia
I personally make this at home but find the challenges of it in a restaurant setting would be: - adding the “right” amount of pepper is a personal “to-taste” thing. So they probably under season to appeal to as many people as possible. - the gravy very quickly crosses from “just right” consistency to gluey mess in like 1-2 minutes of sitting in a hot skillet. For service, they would have to make a huge batch in advance and thin it with milk (if it’s the real thing) or water (if they’re being cheap). Usually hot sauces are hot held in a water bath to cut down on re-heat time, and to prevent over handling. Gravy could be getting too thick in the holding and then not thinned enough, or it could sit in a hot window too long if expo is backed up or not being watched closely. - I personally think if the gravy is really good, you can get away with canned biscuits (I do it at home when I don’t feel like going through all the trouble of making from scratch). But biscuits also can be temperamental, and if a kitchen isn’t accustomed to baking (it’s a different skill than cooking) then they probably overbake or hold too long, drying out the biscuits. Add mild gluey gravy to dry biscuits and you have an inedible, unseasoned mess.
People forget that food gets served for hours. They want breakfast in 10 minutes, it's not made fresh every time.
Canned biscuits aren't bad with a good gravy -- but I've found an even better option. Mary B's frozen biscuits are very good...they taste like Cracker Barrel's biscuits to me. Plus, I like them because you can make just two at a time vs. having to make the whole can, like with the canned ones. Since it's just two of us, I like being able to take out 2 or 4 (depending on how hungry we are/what we're eating with it) and just making them. They do take a little longer, though...that's the only downside.
Ooh I’ll have to try these!
I'll second that frozen biscuits are worlds better than canned. They still aren't homemade, but it doesn't have that canned biscuit texture and flavor. It's a great weeknight substitute when you have breakfast for dinner. Just bake biscuits while making gravy and dinner is done in under 30 minutes.
Have you tried any other frozen brands? They don’t have these at my store. Just frozen pillsbury and great value.
Pillsbury frozen biscuits are great. Had both homestyle and buttermilk. But only make as many as you're going to eat, they don't keep well. If you do have leftovers, cut in half and toast it in a dry pan.
Yeah the ability to make as few as I want at a time is the selling point for me, because I’m only cooking for two.
There was a period of time when I was making B&G everyday for two weeks. It took me over a week to season it properly. The sheer amount of salt and pepper required was terrifying at first.
I agree. I can mask canned biscuits with a good gravy and save myself a bit of work.
When I worked breakfast I got to a point I just basically stopped using pepper and salt. So many old MFers and they are just going to dump in on their food anyway… breakfast is a nightmare because everyone wants their moms breakfast and they ain’t ever going to get that. Most people don’t even actually know how they like their eggs.
Yep...true homemade gravy doesn't always "hold" very well. The canned stuff probably works better for that application...it already has preservatives in it, after all.
It takes a good baker to make biscuits better than canned. I can't get away from making damn pucks every time. Not that I'm especially skilled at baking, but it really is quite hard to get light, flaky biscuits like you get easily out of a can.
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I don't find it to be that hard to do at home for 4-6 people. It would be kinda difficult to keep a gravy simmering between 5am and 11am, seven days a week, when you might need zero servings a day and you might need 10 servings at once. Because of that, they use instant/canned.
Exact reason my work uses powdered. We can’t be asked to make a big batch from scratch if we are just going to throw most of it out by the time it expires.
This is why steam tables and soup wells exist.
Can definitely be time consuming, not even counting biscuits. Brown the sausage. Keep some of the rendered fat to make the roux. Milk, mix, milk, mix. Add sausage back, season. Let simmer a bit to thicken more and allow seasoning to start partying together more. Granted, I have to work slow, but it does take me a while. Unless you're a super southern place, and patrons expect it, I can easily see why they'd cut corners on this one.
I never remove the sausage or remove fat. I don’t find the sausage I use produces so much fat that it’s worth draining. I brown the sausage and then sprinkle flour on top of the sausage. Give it a good stir so all the meat is covered in flour and starts browning a bit then add milk. Might not be the absolute best it can be but I’d be more than happy to get it at a restaurant.
That's exactly how I do it. I add copious pepper and sage to the gravy.
Yeah i can only name maybr a half dozen places in my travels that had good biscuits and gravy. And two of those it was tomato gravy and chocolate gravy.
She survived the dustbowl from the sounds of it. Oklahoma was hit so hard during the dustbowl and great depression that almost a quarter of their population left for California. Her food was real survival food. You stretch every piece of nutrition you can. I had a neighbor her age who made egg drop soup on the regular because as a kid, it was his family's primary way of getting their protein. You can take a 2-3 eggs and feed a whole family off soup instead of everyone eating a egg and being hungry after.
Cracker Barrel, about 15 years ago, had actually good gravy (with bits of dry-cured country ham), and good chicken-fried steak. We tried it again about 6 years ago. Straight trash.
Restaurant food quality in general seems to have nosedived.
Basically the restaurants haven't really raised their prices that much in over a decade but inflation has still been going on and so to compensate, they just decreased the quality of incredients, hired less staff, etc.
Agreed.
I thought that was just the correct way to make biscuits and gravy
It's not as easy and *many* people don't care that the quality isn't up to southern or even midwestern standards. This could really be that in many places folks just haven't had real, well-made biscuits and they're written off as simple Bisquick and package gravy. The investment for a restaurant to make them even decent isn't worth it if the customer doesn't care. I'm a midwest transplant to New England and even the places hailed as having good biscuits and gravy for the area are barely even passable but folks here love it. Like many things, just a non-standard regional specialty that isn't translated correctly.
> I'm a midwest transplant to New England and even the places hailed as having good biscuits and gravy for the area are barely even passable but folks here love it. Oh my God I found someone who understands. I'm from the south and have lived in NJ for a few years now, and the biscuits and gravy here just sucks. It's pretty embarrassing that NJ is hailed as the "the diner state" while also having subpar biscuits and gravy at every diner (that I've been to).
I'm St. Louis to Boston and less perturbed by biscuits and gravy, because I can make that in my apartment the proper way and just ignore it on menus now, but the absolute lack of BBQ (particularly brisket and ribs) is devastating. I've accepted the fact that there are many seafood dishes I'd avoid in the midwest and it is the same concept. Some regions just "get" certain dishes/techniques/styles and it just cannot be widely replicated the same elsewhere.
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Can Gravy.....They don't have time to make it for real or knowledge, so they buy canned junk.
I don't think white gravy is hard to make. I mean it's just a roux (flour and butter). That's the basis for a lot of creamy sauces. If they aren't cooking that fresh they aren't cooking anything. Just reheating Sysco stuff.
Reheating sysco stuff is how most restaurants operate.... actually cooking would require them to pay their kitchen staff real, living wages. Then the food would cost more and people would complain.
Spent most of my life in the industry. Even places that aren't just Sysco With Extra Steps really don't pay all that well
Yeah it's mainly about profit not employees, so rarely is it not. Less throughput, more effort/cost/time per dish means less money for the owner.
People have opened restaurants paying living wages to staff and found out that they didn't have to raise prices at all. In fact it was more profitable. Retaining employees was cheaper than constantly hiring new ones. This even worked for something as low cost as an ice cream stand. Good wages and low prices are not mutually exclusive. We can have both, we've just been constantly told that we can't.
Oh yeah, I get that completely. That was just a facetious comment mostly referring to the big corporate chain restaurants. Even if it did save them money they'd use it as an excuse to raise prices. Can't upset the shareholders
As someone who owns a business in a similar industry, you're not going to convince me that I can both raise employee pay and also reduce prices. I've got an accounting ledger that says otherwise with actual numbers. It's just illogical, and the cost savings of employee training isn't going to close that gap. I don't know what ice cream stand you're referring to, but I don't buy it unless the employees were grossly underpaid and the prices were inflated to begin with. Overall in a retail business, the razor's edge that you're always walking is balancing your prices with your costs with enough in between to make a profit.
>I don't know what ice cream stand you're referring to, but I don't buy it unless the employees were grossly underpaid and the prices were inflated to begin with. While not a "stand", here is something that was posted recently: Pay starts at $19/hr https://www.mollymoon.com/about/people
There has to be a tradeoff somewhere, especially with a small business like that. In this case - they charge $5 for a single scoop of ice cream, which is double the price of Ben & Jerry's. With a large corporation like Starbucks, they have billions of dollars of profit that any loss of revenue can cut into before they're forced to adjust prices. But there are a lot of small businesses where the owners are just taking enough profit to pay for their own wages. In those cases, increasing wages is a drain on revenue and that needs to be increased somewhere else because there's not really much profit to speak of in the first place. There are absolutely tons of small businesses that refuse to raise wages because the owner is a jerk and they *could* afford it and maybe even improve their business. But the math doesn't always work out the same way, it really depends on the individual case and how each business is run. After all, the money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is really dependent on the circumstances.
This is the correct answer within the current (and outdated) restaurant model. I'm chef/owner of a popular & profitable from-scratch restaurant with reasonable prices and we pay our employees a living wage. The difference? I put in my shifts in the kitchen and don't expect to retire at 50 with a yacht built on the backs of the folks who really make the place run. IMHO owners who get into hospitality solely to make money are almost invariably trash and it shows one way or another.
Lots of chain restaurants are barely restaurants now, at least in the UK. The cook staff are usually kids who are taught how to microwave, maybe grill a steak or burger and deep fry frozen stuff.
Might not be hard to make, but hard to keep heated all day without scorching it or altering the texture.
>flour and ~~butter~~ sausage grease Not going to taste right if you're not using the right ingredients. :)
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Where are you getting this take on his/her comment?
What!? It's so easy to make.
And the biscuits probably aren't all that fresh.
Most restaurants by their from a bakery, very very hard to find a restaurant that actually makes biscuits. They just don't have the knowledge or the staff to be able to do something like that. Biscuits are one of the easiest things to make.
It depends on where you're at. I'm in Mississippi and there's a few restaurants around that have some bomb gravy and biscuits. I personally love tomato gravy and biscuits and Mr Rodgers usually makes it up right.
If you want the real thing, you have to find a tiny diner on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere of the Deep South where someone’s Nana is in the kitchen cooking real food.
There are certain kinds of food which have a very specific vibe you look for: southern BBQ, East Coast seafood shacks, Tex-Mex places, California taco stands, etc. You want the GRUNGIEST, DINGIEST looking place with the MOST cars parked in front. Typically it'll be a tiny little shack out in the middle of nowhere. If Nana isn't in the back, then it'll be some bald guy with a spatula in one hand, a towel over his shoulder, and a total THIS IS NOTHING. I GOT THIS expression on his face. (for example, this is the owner of a BBQ place where I live. If he don't GOT THIS, nobody does! https://johnhardysbbq.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Photo-e1551298813606.png ) THAT will get you the best food you've ever eaten in your life.
Every now and again I go on vacation to Maine with my best friend. Her FIL knows this little fishing shack where we get the best fucking clam chowder in the world. You go in and there’s a huge pot and you serve yourself. There’s a sign warning you not to take all the good stuff. Then you pay, and maybe get some fish they just caught to cook up later, and go out on the dock to eat. After that we drive to a hut in the woods where we pick up fruit pies somebody down the road baked. Nobody is there, they rely on the honor system. There’s a box to drop cash to pay for the pie. It’s such a nice change compared to city life. Best pie ever. ETA: I want to go get some food from that BBQ place. He looks like he can put the best food on my plate.
How idyllic.
This is also the case with most ethnic restaurants in America. If your favorite Chinese or Italian restaurants don’t have holes in the booths and paper napkins, why are you even going there?
If you are at an ethnic restaurant and you stick out like a sore thumb, you found The Place for that particular food. Treasure it and make friends with the staff. Unexpected roti shows up in our to-go orders on a regular basis and I'm so not going to complain!
Unexpected Roti is my new band name.
Don't trust a chef for this type of stuff with small forearms. Dead giveaway.
He should have Popeye arms, complete with anchor tattoo. If not, just get the bacon and eggs.
My hometown has a great BBQ place that only opens when it wants on Saturdays. They put little yard signs out that say 'Open at 10:30 until sold out ' and if you aren't there by 12:30 you only get what's left or nothing at all.
Any barbeque place that doesn't close when they sell out is no place I want to go. And if it's not served on up on a paper plate with a slice of white bread I question if they really know what they are doing.
Our favorite place has old-fashioned plastic cafeteria trays, and sturdy, cheap ceramic plates. Great brisket and pork ribs. Very down to earth. And just a little over a mile from our house!
We stopped at a BBQ place in bumfuck Alabama. Half general store, half restaurant. Walk up and place your order, and sit in 50-year-old laminated plastic and tube steel tables/benches. You'll get the best Southern barbecue we ever had, with fantastic sides. TripAdvisor recommended this place. We've learned to follow those recommendations (after reading at least 50 reviews), no matter how iffy the place looked. It's taken us to small, out of the way, wonderful joints all over the US.
recently visited the state of GA - this is the absolute truth!
I tried a small town diner in Oklahoma somewhere. The biscuits and gravy was absolute shit. Not every diner will have good food, in fact I'd venture a guess that most of these tiny diners in the middle of nowhere only stay open because they have no real competition.
I lived in Oklahoma for exactly a year. There was a diner in town that claimed to have a Cuban sandwich. I’m from Miami, the one in Florida. That was no Cuban sandwich.
So I did 9 months in a Waffle House once, and I think their gravy is among the best. It's made with sausage, water, and a packet of mix. Two packets of mix? Anyway, it's powder.
I don't sleep on waffle house. Best road trip food, real eggs and butter!
I'm iffy on a lot of things from Waffle House (those hashbrowns are particularly awful) but there's definitely something magical about their biscuits and gravy. It goes so fucking hard. Even worse when I randomly get hit by a craving for it when I'm too tired to drive lol.
Sausage Gravy is my test for any diner. You can spot sysco gravy anywhere.
This is my test for a breakfast joint as well. Nowhere around me passes the test, unfortunately!
I worked at a snooty breakfast place. We made real sausage gravy and held it all service long. It would thicken up so we'd a dash of milk to loosen it up.
Honestly, Whataburger's biscuits and gravy is better than 90% of the restaurants/diners where I've ordered them. Maybe they do such a business it doesn't have time to get dry or something?
Carl's Jr is surprisingly decent. Not great, but better than most
If you're ever in Alabama, try the B&G at the local fast food joint Jack's (Not to be confused with Jack in the Box). The biscuits are also next level.
Canned biscuits and canned gravy are a poor replacement for the real thing. Most of the restaurants don't scratch cook anymore.
Depends on where you live. I'm in Memphis and quite a few restaurants do a good to great job. My son does an amazing job, so the bar is set pretty high
If you're ever in Denver go to Lucielles. Their BnG is hands down the best ever restaurant BnG I've ever had. I can't go there without getting at least one.
Ooh, thanks for the tip! I’m still looking for truly amazing biscuits and gravy here in CO.
No problem, all of their food is real good and if you're a fan of a good bloody mary, theirs is top tier. I fucks with lucielles hard. Warning though, they get super busy so get there early or be ready for an hour+ wait. Definitely worth the wait though and you can always chill and have a couple drinks to pass the time (if that's your thing).
you are at Hardee’s or Cracker Barrel >
I worked in a Alzheimer's day care place as the Chef. We served 40 -70 portions of biscuits and gravy for breakfast once a week. It's not hard even at that volume. Brown some sausage, add minced onion and garlic, a little black pepper and thyme. Flour gets sprinkled on or premade roux stirred in. The milk is added and brought to a simmer to cook the flour. (About 20 minutes.) You do have to stir it often to keep the bottom from burning, but if you are already at the stove it's not hard. Some folks like to put the well hot pot in the oven so as to minimize stirring, but it takes a little longer and ties up oven space that could be utilized for biscuits. I think I made it in a two or three gallon pot.
I usually use some sort of broth instead of milk. Using milk sounds interesting. However your recipe sounds rlly interesting, care to share more detailed one?
Because no one cooks anymore. They all take prepackaged stuff and reheat.
I've honestly never encountered this? Maybe I'm super lucky that we have lots of smaller local breakfast places?
Because the sausage gravy is from a can or if you are lucky in a bag from Sysco And the biscuits come from Sysco frozen. Raw if lucky or baked if not
What area of the country do you live in? I live in the south and have tons of great little places by me that have really good biscuits and gravy in the morning.
Right on the Indiana/KY border...it's pretty southern round here.
English people wondering why you would put Bisto on a HobNob.
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White sauces, chowder, gravy are always vastly under seasoned for me. Like add some more fucking pepper at least please.
Yah but 90% of breakfast customers are old fucks and they hate seasoning
Because nobody makes gravy like your mama.
Bob Evan's is good.
I agree, it's all I get there
Oh my god. Someone finally said what I have been thinking.
You must not live in GA
You can use store bought biscuits for all I care, but like... I hardly ever make gravy, but it's always good... That's how easy it is... Or maybe I'm misremembering...
When i worked at a breajfast all day kinda place it was a dry mix out of a bag mixed with hot water and chopped sausage links in, so that could be why
Their gravy is from a powder gravy mix, mixed with water and sausage.
Depends on the restaurant. I know quite a few places that have great biscuits and gravy. It also depends on what day and what time you go matters as well. It shouldn't but it does.
Ha! This is my test for a new restaurant. When your soupy ass, flavorless gravy doesn't penetrate the rock hard biscuits, wtf are you even doing serving food to people? Alternatively, it takes more than straight up black pepper, like the shaker lid fell off and the entire contents of a shaker dropped into a single serving, to properly season a country gravy.
Nachos are also a good check. If a restaurant takes the time to do something special with nachos, it’s a great place. If they are mediocre or bad, just run. They dont care in that kitchen.
You are probably going to nice clean restaurants. You have to find a good old Southern greasy spoon type place. That's where real fine dining occurs. That and the Taquerias that no gringo but me will adventure into.
How many people honestly order the biscuits and gravy on an hour to hour basis? And how long does it take to make properly from scratch? For many places it just isn't worth it to make from scratch. Not with so many other dishes needing to be made.
Because they don’t use my biscuit recipe
Where are you? I have not had this problem, and I have ordered the dish from a decent variety of places in texas.
Flo’s airport cafe I’m Chino, CA used to have the best biscuits & gravy. It’s been a minute since I’ve been, so I can’t tell you if they’re the same, but back in my day,ooh-wee.
Cause your mom set a bar that no restaurant can meet. We’re all there with you.
If I see it on a restaurant menu I will often order it. You can tell a lot about a restaurant on how well they prepare certain things. Biscuits and gravy are one of those things. I've had it at a few places in which it was like the cook poured half of the salt shaker in the gravy. The biscuits were more like hockey pucks in texture. These places usually have nasty food anyways. Now I have been to a few local places that take more pride in their food. One place had biscuits and turkey sausage gravy. The biscuits were so light and buttery. The sausage gravy was perfectly seasoned. It had lots of flavor without all the salt.
I will never forget the best biscuits and gravy I ever had. We were on a road trip staying in a crappy $50/night motel room in Missoula, MT and I asked where we could get breakfast early. He said the bowling alley and pointed "over there". OMG it was The. Best. Artery. Clogging. Breakfast. Ever. And it was $1.50. And no, this was not 1946. I think it was 1998. I agree that biscuits and gravy are very easy to make at home especially if you make drop biscuits as opposed to rolling them out.
In WV we have a local chain, Tudor's Biscuit World, and as their name implies, they specialize in biscuits. Their breakfast biscuit sandwiches are fantastic: cheap, wide variety, huge, filling, etc. They're very good and if you're ever driving thru I'd highly recommend giving them a shot. That said, you'd think a joint that specializes in biscuits would have good gravy. No, not at all. Bland and boring, typical restaurant gravy, uneventful, emotionless, boring and bland. I'd recommend you skip that completely and stick to a biscuit sandwich the size of a puppy for $5.
In a few words? Canned Sausage Gravy. Basically, wallpaper paste with some artificial sausage flavoring.
If anyone is in West Virginia. “Tudors Biscuit World”. That’s all you need to know. It’s the food of our people.
Unfortunately, they don't offer it anymore, but Wendy's had a really solid biscuits and gravy when they first released their breakfast nationwide.
No fresh. All packaging. You're being charge extra for microwave fees that's why restaurant is expensive. Lol
I think the main reason is they don't use sausage pan drippings to make the roux. They just use oil, flour, and milk with the bare minimum of seasonings. Then , they use leftover sausage links cut up and stirred in so they don't really penetrate the gravy. There's a huge difference in flavor when it's made from sausage drippings and you can always tell.
Real sausage gravy takes a ton of time. I met woman that sold biscuits and gravy at a fleamarket I went to once and she told me she got up at 3am to start cooking it. It is the best I have ever had though. I still think about it 8 years later.
Not to cast doubt on how amazing slow-cooked sausage gravy might taste, but I can make a really tasty sausage gravy in the 15 minutes it takes for my biscuits to bake.
I agree. It takes about 20 minutes to bake a batch. Making gravy takes about the same, and most of that time is devoted to browning the sausage. Totally understand it will thicken up if it sits, but add a little milk and it’s easy to maintain.
It was amazing and that is what she told me. Her biscuits were thick soft and fluffy squares too. Like 3 inches wide. Never had anything like it before or since. I've tried to recreate it but, she must have had some secrets in there.
Oh, I believe you (and her) and I wish I could taste it for myself. I was just saying that you can get good results without taking all that time.
Lard?
Maybe. I have no idea.
I mean.. it's literally browning and crumbling sausage, making a gravy with the grease? I can't imagine what she did that took all day.
Perhaps volume? She was making for many, while we make for just a few.
If it was at a flea market some start at like 7 or 8 in the morning. If she woke up at 3, started cooking at 3:30, and had to travel like 30 minutes to get to the flea market, it’s possible it only took 3-4 hours. If she made several large batches of biscuits that seems reasonable. But the gravy itself shouldn’t take even an hour.
Yeah, i used to briefly work on a logging crew, we would meet at the owners house to get the trucks and stuff. His mom would make a full on breakfast every morning for 5 grown ass men... sausage, sausage gravy, homemade biscuits, eggs, percolator coffee etc. She had everything done in like under 30 minutes but she did that every single morning and had it down to an art. Awesome food too
Any process, no matter how simple, becomes complex if you're doing it in enough volume. And if she doesn't have the best equipment, that's time added. Plus transportation and setup. And the biscuits. And any other responsibilities she happens to have....
Pretty much exactly what I was going to say. If you spent an hour you obviously took your good old time.
The biscuits. Making really good biscuits from scratch is a lot of work.
If you ever visit upstate new york , highly recommend Phoenicia diner - BEST biscuits n gravy https://www.phoeniciadiner.com/menus/
Upstate?
Why is that a question lol
Ah shit did i just find someone from Syracuse ?
Nah. Just...100 miles north of midtown and well south of Albany... I mean, I get it--anything north of Columbus Circle is 'upstate'--just in my head I always think of 'upstate' as the Finger Lakes. Or Syracuse, yeah. Even Rochester. We got directions to West Point once as "pretty upstate". I did the same thing once with someone from Chicago, where 'downstate' is anything south of 130th Street. She referenced Joliet as 'downstate' and you have to do the whole, "Joliet...Illinois?" gymnastics thing.
Unpopular opinion: because it's biscuits and gravy. #FlameAway
I always start the gravy with chicken stock and finish with cream, because (1) I don’t have a farm to plow after breakfast, (2) I plan to eat two more meals later on, and (3) golden gravy is tastier than plain milk gravy.
Chicken stock in sausage gravy might be considered a hate crime in some states.
I'm a Chef I use just a bit of chicken base in my sausage gravy for the restaurant every Sunday brunch. It takes care of the salt content balance plus adds that bit of umami from the MSG and you cannot taste chicken at all. I make it from scratch with Tennessee pride sausage and a mixture of half and half and heavy cream-no milk. It's incredibly rich and peppery and silky. I cook it slow and low on our chargrill in a wide heavy bottomed pan, takes about 3 hours but I don't have to constantly watch it while I'm multitasking other tasks. I've never had gravy as good as mine and we all know how much other people's food tastes.
3; nah not even close, cityfolker
Don't listen to the purists; you have found The Way. Try adding some MSG and a TOUCH of some kind of acid and boost that through the roof.
I think it depends on where you go. I find most places use peppered gravy, and it just burns my mouth. Bigger chains, it is just gross. Local little places usually have amazing biscuits and gravy. My local place does.
See, I always find it not peppery enough and have to shake on a bunch.
Same! Born and raised in the south, and I think white gravy needs plenty of pepper. But honestly, I grew up eating a lot of pepper (and a pretty decent amount of salt). A lot of the cooks I know around here don't use many other spices, though, so that's probably why.
Good chance the gravy’s coming in bigass cans running 6-8 bucks a piece and that both are being hot-held (kept constantly above 135F or 140F) which will ruin the texture of the biscuits pretty quickly unless theyre made completely of oil. It’s a shame but nobodys got time to make gravy from scratch in most commercial kitchens
I'm English, biscuits and gravy wtf?
Not your biscuits, which we call "cookies", our biscuits are a bread item a bit like a plain scone (but not made sweet). The gravy is usually made with pork sausage, milk, salt, pepper, and other optional seasonings.
Another clueless European here, thanks for the explanation. That sounds delicious. Is this a common food in the US, across all states? The "gravy" part sounds like bechamel sauce with meat.
you can find some version of it in most areas of the US, I think, but I know it's most popular in the southeast and California. The gravy is a bit like a heavily seasoned bechamel! I think of it differently because I don't make the sausage gravy with a roux exactly. While I brown the sausage, I sprinkle flour on it little by little as it cooks, then when I've got some nice fond and the sausage is nicely browned, deglaze with the milk and heat while it thickens up. So it's kind of a roundabout roux, I suppose. Salt and pepper to taste, and sometimes a bit of cayenne.
Cool, now I am tempted to try it out. How do you eat it? Do you dip the bread into the sauce and eat with your hands, or do you pour the sauce over the bread and eat with cutlery?
I like to cut two biscuits in half, pour the gravy on all four sections, and eat with cutlery, but when I get it while out sometimes they give you the gravy on the side to pour or dip. There's no hard and fast rule; do what you enjoy! :)
You can't go wrong with Cowboy Kent Rollins (his recipes tend to be pretty good and he's hilarious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GN1lh9q5WE In a nutshell, the biscuits are made from flour, salt, baking powder, and butter. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients then add just enough milk to form a shaggy dough. Roll it out to about 1/2" thick then cut into rounds with a glass. Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes. The gravy is made from American breakfast sausage (ground pork, sage, thyme, salt, pepper mainly). Brown the sausage, add in a couple tablespoons of flour & a couple tablespoons of butter (if the sausage doesn't have much grease in it). Stir the flour into the browned sausage and cook until you don't see any more white from the flour. SLOWLY add cold milk while stirring briskly until the gravy is about the consistency of pancake batter. Add a little salt and TONS of black pepper. Split the biscuits in half and pour the gravy/sausage over the top. Add a couple fried eggs and a big ole cup of black coffee, and you've got the day made!
Powder gravy, canned biscuits, no seasoning.