Old-Fashioned Sausage Gravy and Biscuits Done Right

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ Biscuits split open and steaming, buried under thick, creamy sausage gravy, speckled with black pepper and heavy enough to hold its shape on the fork. Three ingredients — sausage, flour, milk — and a dozen small ways to get it wrong. Here's how it was made on a farm every morning, for men who'd been working two hours before they sat down. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. In the corner of almost every farmhouse cellar there's a big stoneware crock with a white ring inside. The family says pickles. A lot of them held sausage, fried and packed under lard to last the winter. SAUSAGE GRAVY 1 lb bulk pork breakfast sausage · ¼ cup flour · 3 cups whole milk · 1 tsp coarse black pepper · salt only if it needs it 1. Brown the sausage in cast iron, broken up small. Let it get brown, not gray. Cook it through. 2. DON'T drain. You want 3–4 Tbsp of fat (add butter or bacon grease if it's lean). 3. Sprinkle in the flour and cook it 2 full minutes. 4. Add the milk ONE CUP AT A TIME, stirring smooth between each. 5. Simmer 5 minutes until it bubbles and thickens. Take it off a little loose. 6. Pepper, then taste before you salt. RUTH'S BISCUITS 2 cups flour · 1 Tbsp baking powder · ½ tsp baking soda · 1 tsp salt · ⅓ cup cold lard or butter · ¾ cup cold buttermilk Cut in the fat, stir in the buttermilk just until it comes together, pat and fold, cut straight down (don't twist), bake touching at 450°F for 12–15 min. Ruth's sausage seasoning (per lb ground pork): 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp rubbed sage, ½ tsp black pepper, pinch of red pepper flakes, pinch of brown sugar. Rest overnight. Sausage gravy, sawmill gravy or white gravy — what did your family call it, and what did it go on? Tell me who made it. I read every one.