There’s at least one sandwich in this blog post that I’ve wanted to write about for a couple of years, but it is such a simple sandwich that I decided instead to focus on a gravy that might accompany parts of that sandwich. I’m talking about a country ham biscuit and red-eye gravy, but most of the content in this sandwich blog post isn’t about that; it’s about the gravy and some other types of gravy as well.
This is no longer primarily about a sandwich. This is about gravy. Gravy is a vibe. We will embrace that gravy vibe and make four different gravy-focused sauces to pair with two different types of biscuits. Who knows, one gravy might even be vegetarian.
Is gravy a sauce?
Yes. Gravy is a sauce. Many different gravies are a child sauce of one of the five mother sauces.
At their most basic, the four different gravy options that I’m writing about today are sauces that are created from drippings from cooked meat or another type of fat that has liquid added to it, and they’re seasoned and cooked together until warm. One gravy isn’t thickened, but the other three gravies that we’ll be discussing have thickening agents in them in the form of all-purpose flour, which is cooked briefly in the residual drippings or fat to create a roux.
What is a roux?
A roux is an equal part of fat and flour that is cooked together to build a thickening agent for a sauce, or in this case, a gravy. The word roux comes from the French language because it is a French technique used to create at least three mother sauces.
Mother sauces
I’m not a chef, and I’m definitely not an expert on French cuisine or any of the five recognized mother sauces. Here’s a blog post from Food52 that contains a good rundown on mother sauces in case you want to learn more, but I will give a rough walkthrough of these sauces because the first two are similar to some of the gravy I’m covering today.
| Béchamel | Made with butter, flour, and milk or cream. Creates a white sauce, which can be used as the base for mac and cheese, and many white gravies like sausage gravy (switching butter for pork fat/drippings). |
| Velouté | Similar to a bechamel, but instead of milk, a clear stock, like chicken or fish stock, is used as the liquid element to create a thin, velvety sauce. |
| Espagnole | A dark brown sauce like you might find in Beef Bourguignon. Created with a dark roux (butter and flour cooked until darkened), and the liquid is typically beef or veal stock. |
| Tomato Sauce | A sauce made from tomatoes, often flavored with pork and vegetables, that is cooked down into a thick sauce. |
| Hollandaise | The sauce you’ll typically see on Eggs Benedict. Hollandaise is the base for another French sauce known as Bernaise. |
Béchamel and Velouté are both fairly similar to each other, with their major differences being the type of liquid used to create the sauce. And they’re also pretty much the technique for creating three of the four gravy styles that I’m writing about today. You create a roux with fat and flour, and then you add liquid, which turns the roux paste into a sauce or gravy.
Biscuit and gravy navigation
There are a whole bunch of different types of gravy. But three of the four I’m writing about today are specifically gravies that might be served at breakfast. Often, gravy is created after cooking the meat for breakfast, and then that gravy is served, or drizzled on top of the meat, potatoes, or biscuits.
If it’s breakfast and you have gravy, then you should probably also have some biscuits. Here’s some navigation if you want to jump around the biscuit and gravy content.
Biscuits, folded or dropped
I have shared a lot of biscuit content over the years, enough so that I have a whole page of the site dedicated to aggregating biscuit content, tips, and recipes. But today I want to talk about the difference between traditional folded biscuits and drop biscuits.
Folded biscuits end up with layers like the one you see here, which I shared on Instagram. The biscuit dough is folded 4 or 5 times prior to baking, which turns into thin layers of dough that make the biscuit flaky. Drop biscuits skip this folding step entirely.
Drop biscuits are formed and mixed in a similar fashion to folded biscuits, but instead of the folding step, they are scooped right onto the sheet pan. They are still soft on the inside and crispy on the outside, but they will not have layers, and they will not appear shaped like the folded biscuits.
I rarely make drop biscuits because I like the appearance of a folded biscuit. The folded variety is the tried and true recipe that I have been baking for years whenever I am planning to make any sort of biscuit sandwich. The recipe is shared widely, but I was first introduced to it on Southern Living’s YouTube channel in this “How to Perfect Your Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe” video that was shared about 10 years ago or so.
The main question I get asked most often about this biscuit recipe is if there is a substitute for the self-rising flour.
Folded buttermilk biscuits without self-rising flour
Many buttermilk biscuit recipes will be written to use self-rising flour. Mine is, but there are changes you can make if you don’t want to buy a special type of flour that you don’t already have in your pantry.
If you do not have self-rising flour, you can use all-purpose flour, but you have to make a couple of adjustments. Self-rising flour typically has a lower protein content than all-purpose flour, and it also has a leavening agent in it, which is typically baking powder. Self-rising flour also contains salt, so if you want a perfect approximation, you will need to add some of that to all-purpose flour as well.
Self-Rising Flour Conversion
1 cup of self-rising flour
=
1 cup all-purpose flour
+ 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
+ 1/4 teaspoon salt
I’ve added the math for translating 1 cup of self-rising flour to AP flour here. This means, for my recipe, which uses 2.5 cups of flour, you’ll need to add 1 tablespoon + 3/4 teaspoon baking powder and a heaping 1/2 teaspoon salt to turn 2.5 cups of all-purpose flour into a self-rising alternative. All of this is now in the notes for my recipe so check those out if you plan to bake these biscuits.
Buttermilk biscuits
Adapted from Southern Living's best buttermilk biscuits recipe. This is a super easy biscuit recipe, requiring only three ingredients plus a pinch of love.
Get RecipeDrop biscuits
Drop biscuits contain the same ingredients as regular biscuits, but in slightly different amounts. The ingredients are stirred together in the same way and pretty much baked in the same way. The only difference is in the shaping or scooping of the biscuits. Normal folded buttermilk biscuits are mixed into a dough and are folded to create lamination between layers of dough, whereas drop biscuits are scooped and simply dropped onto a sheet pan and baked.
Drop biscuits need to be a bit moister than a folded buttermilk biscuit recipe, so that they can be scooped a bit more easily. But other than that, we should treat these in a similar fashion to regular folded biscuits. Mainly, you should try to keep the butter and the milk/liquid as cold as possible for as long as possible. This means I typically will put the flour mixed with the butter back in the freezer while the oven preheats. Or you can go ahead and mix it with the liquid and again put everything in the freezer to firm up just a bit more, and scoop out your drop biscuits at the last minute, right before you put them in the oven.
Here’s my drop biscuit recipe. It’s just a bit easier to tackle than folding buttermilk biscuits, and might be more along the style of biscuits that novice bakers might want to tackle.
Easy drop biscuits
Drop biscuits are one of the easiest ways to bake biscuits with almost no handling of the dough. All you need is a bowl, a spoon, and a scoop to produce these biscuits that are crunchy on the outside, soft and comforting on the inside.
Get RecipeGravytime
I have covered four different gravy options that are all great on either of the biscuit options. The first is one that I’ve been meaning to write about for years, because it’s a staple of the area where I grew up.
Country ham and red-eye gravy
Country ham and red-eye gravy are a big deal where I grew up in Eastern North Carolina. Anytime my family would go to breakfast, country ham would be a meat option right there beside bacon and sausage. Many southern states surrounding NC also have a history with country ham and how it is prepared, due to how meat has been preserved throughout history.
Country ham
Country ham is different from the type of ham that you might get sliced at the deli counter of your local grocery store. Country ham is dry-brined for a number of months, which cures the meat much like prosciutto or a Spanish Iberian jamón. The type of ham that you typically see in the grocery store is wet-brined for less time, which means it has a much shorter period where it will stay fresh. There are examples of people storing cured country ham for decades. The Isle of Wight Country Museum in Smithfield, Virginia, has a ham on display that was cured in 1902, and they claim it is still edible.
If you’re curious about the oldest ham in the world, the Isle of Wight Country Museum has a “ham cam” where they live stream the 120+ year old ham.
If you’ve never had country ham, the main thing you should take note of is that it is likely to be very salty. I mean, really salty. A lot of people will soak country ham in water before cooking it to try to strip off some of the saltiness. If you’re a person who doesn’t like salty things, I would suggest you try that, and you could also pair the meat with something sweet like preserves to hopefully tone down some of the salt.
I am not able to find country ham in Chicago. Or at least I’ve never seen it. Technically, I could make my own by curing a ham for a few months, but instead I just buy Dan’l Boone brand country ham off of the internet. There are other brands available, and none of them are cheap, but I have a bit of a history with the Dan’l Boone brand because it’s made by the company that owns a restaurant with the same name that I loved in Boone, NC, where I first went to college.
A visit to the Dan’l Boone Inn would mean that you were about to get family family-style breakfast or lunch with lots of biscuits and gravy, with country ham for breakfast and fried chicken for lunch. Very comforting sort of place where you need to wear your fat pants with elastic waistbands.
If you’re going to the trouble of acquiring and cooking up some country ham, you might as well give red-eye gravy a try just to see what all the fuss is about.
Red-eye gravy
Red-eye gravy is composed of two or possibly three ingredients. The first ingredient is the leftover fond that you’ll find in the pan after you cook country ham. Fond is the little brown specks or dark spots on the pan that are residual cast off from cooking the meat.
The second ingredient is strong black coffee. The third ingredient is optional because some people will add just a touch of sugar to cut some of the coffee’s bitterness.
Ok, I’ll be real here. I don’t necessarily love redeye gravy. I’m not a coffee drinker, which really starts me off on the wrong foot, but this gravy is really bitter. I don’t personally think it pairs that well with the salty ham, but apparently I’m in the minority here because red-eye gravy will appear on pretty much any breakfast menu that has country ham on it. So, obviously, many people love it. If you’re a coffee fan, I would bet that you’d enjoy it as well.
Red-eye gravy edit (added after publishing this blog post)
A reader named Bill mentioned, in the comments below, that he was introduced to red-eye gravy from a Tom Robbins novel, and when he looked up the recipe, he happened to find one in The Joy of Cooking from 1997 that contains cream. For me, as a non-coffee drinker, this sounds like a smart addition that would mellow out some of the bitterness. I will probably give this a shot next time I cook country ham and biscuits.
And it just so happens that I have that same 1997 version of Joy of Cooking and found the recipe. Here’s the excerpt.
Here’s the recipe I use to make red-eye gravy. It’s super simple and pretty traditional due to the fact that it’s literally just two components simmered together for a short period of time.
Red-eye gravy with country ham
I hope you like coffee, because that's the primary flavor in this southern-style country ham gravy.
Get RecipeSausage gravy
Of these four gravy options, sausage gravy is my favorite. It’s pretty much perfect for scooping onto split buttermilk biscuits. The base for the gravy is the fat that is cooked out of the sausage and left in the pan. Then flour turns that fat into a paste that will thicken the milk that you add during the cooking process. Some recipes will tell you to cook the sausage crumbles and then remove them from the pan while you make the gravy, but I think those crumbles still contain a lot of their fat stuck to the outside, and having them in the gravy while it cooks is important to creating a good sauce.
I typically use pork sausage or “breakfast sausage” that comes in a plastic tube at my grocery store. You can make your own if you want, but just make sure that there’s a lot of sage in the meat mixture if you want to ensure that this gravy tastes like it was made in the South.
Consistency in gravy making is one of the more challenging factors. Because of the thickening ability of the fat and flour, a gravy can go from fairly thin to super thick very quickly. Gravy will also thicken upon standing as well so you might end up adding a small amount of milk or cream to thin things out if you’re busy cooking other ingredients like biscuits or eggs.
Also, there’s a question of how you like your gravy? I personally like it a little bit on the thicker side of things, but I know that some people prefer a thinner gravy. If the gravy you’ve made is too thick, add more milk. If it’s too thin, you can simmer for a few minutes to thicken it up a bit more.
Sausage gravy
Everyone should know how to make sausage gravy. You never know when there will be a gravy emergency and you will have to step up and save the world. You should be prepared.
Get RecipeOnion gravy
I wrote about this onion gravy early last year when I shared a fried pork biscuit sandwich. This is a gravy that is made without any meat, so you have to bring in the fat from butter. Other than that, it’s very similar to sausage gravy.
As long as you like the texture of onions, I would suggest not cooking them down until they are super soft. Let them retain some of their texture so that there will still be some texture in the final gravy.
You can also take this same gravy technique and use it to make a mushroom gravy. Just saute the mushrooms first, add more fat and flour, and then cream to thicken into a mushroom sauce perfect for topping a biscuit.
Creamy onion gravy
A creamy savory gravy created with a big, sweet Vidalia onion flavor. If you opt to use vegetable stock, this gravy can be vegetarian friendly.
Get RecipeProsciutto and red wine gravy
This is not a typical gravy that you might find on biscuits in the South, unless you’re referring to southern Italy. This recipe creates a smooth gravy that’s full of flavor, and it also leaves you with a whole bunch of crispy pieces of prosciutto that you can sprinkle on whatever gets covered in gravy.
The base for the gravy is once again like the sausage gravy and the onion gravy, but this one differs when it comes to the liquid part of the gravy combination. This gravy is using red wine and chicken or beef stock to create the sauce, so it ends up more like a Velouté than a Béchamel (did you pay attention at the top when I wrote about mother sauces?).
This is not a traditional gravy, and I’m not sure if Italian people would be angry that I created the recipe, but it’s pretty good and worked great on a biscuit. The extra sprinkling of crispy prosciutto helped a lot, too, because it added extra texture to the whole experience.
This will not be a super thick gravy like sausage gravy, as you can see in this gif, it’s much closer to the texture you’d find in a turkey gravy at Thanksgiving.
Basically, if you can make this gravy, you can make a turkey gravy or chicken gravy; all you need is some fat, flour, and liquid like chicken stock, and you’re in business.
Prosciutto and red wine gravy
This recipe creates a smooth gravy that brings big, savory flavors to top your next grilled pork chop, steak, or even a biscuit.
Get RecipeAnd that’s four different gravies that you can test out in your own kitchen. Whip up a batch of biscuits and go nuts! Feel free to ask any gravy questions or tell me your favorite gravy in the comments below.
Check back next week
Next week we’ll be making cutlets and messing around with vodka. Get ready.
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Bill says:
Northerner here, who was introduced to red-eye gravy by a Tom Robbins novel maybe 25-30 years back? The recipe I found back then and still use involves ham drippings, coffee and cream — the cream is added after the coffee has deglazed the pan drippings and come to a boil/simmer: the ration is 2:1 coffee: cream. You then simmer and stir until the gravy thickens. The resulting gravy is indeed tinted red, and you might find it tastier than the version you are used to! Might not be authentic, but in a nation that adds cream to Alfredo sauce, um, yay innovation, I guess? Anyway, the recipe is in a couple-of-generations-back Joy of Cooking (the 1997 revised version).
Jonathan Surratt says:
That’s an interesting addition that makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it. Thanks for the info. I’ll look up that recipe because I probably have a Joy of Cooking that’s about that old.
Jonathan Surratt says:
Bill. I found my Joy of Cooking and it’s from 1997 too. I’m not sure how many versions they made of it, but I added a couple of screenshots of the recipe and the mention about cream to the blog post. Thanks again. I’m going to try it next time I cook country ham.