Biscuits and gravy

I love breakfast.

I usually don't get to have a great breakfast during the work week, so when the weekend arrives I often go nuts. And one of my all-time favorite breakfasts (especially when hungover) is the Southern staple of biscuits and gravy. Generally this means sage-y, spicy pork breakfast sausage in a heavy cream-laden sauce poured over freshly baked buttermilk biscuits. It's delicious, but it will probably shave a few weeks off of your life.

Recently, Beth and I had a more healthful (though certainly not as healthful as, say, oatmeal and fresh fruit) version of this dish at a bistro called Ortine, in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. It featured whole wheat biscuits with rich, creamy mushroom gravy and a side of breakfast sausage which, while delicious, was actually superfluous. Given our recent mastery of biscuit making, we vowed at the time that we'd have to recreate this dish at home.

This morning we had the chance. Last night we hosted some friends for dinner, and one of the dishes we made was fancy macaroni and cheese with morel mushrooms and crispy leeks. We used dried morel mushrooms, which have to be reconstituted. This process yields a couple of cups of morel liquid that is simply too delicious to be discarded. So we saved it.

When brainstorming breakfast this morning, Beth mentioned making buttermilk biscuits and I immediately thought of making a mushroom gravy to go with them. To make Southern pork sausage gravy, you fry up your breakfast sausage (which is usually already spiced with lots of sage), remove it from the pan, and make a roux with whatever fat is left in the pan. Then you add lots of black pepper and some heavy cream.

With mushrooms and mushroom broth, the process is fairly similar. I sliced and sautéed some cremini mushrooms in butter with lots of chopped sage and thyme, removed them from the pan, then added a little extra leftover bacon fat to the pan (more butter would be fine, but you need some fat in the pan, otherwise you really can't make a proper gravy). Then I whisked in some flour to make a roux; added some warmed mushroom broth, more sage and thyme, and lots of black pepper, brought to a boil, then turned down the heat and reduced it a little bit. Finally, I returned the mushrooms to the pan, added a little half and half to make the sauce a little creamier, let it thicken, and voilá: a rich, creamy, spicy, herb-y mushroom gravy as good as any sausage gravy I've had.

Meantime, Beth made her buttermilk biscuits with some whole-wheat flour (which I hemmed and hawed about until she reminded me how good Ortine's were), and they turned out great.

More on biscuit making in another post, but I'll just post the mushroom gravy recipe here. I imagine this would also be delicious over some steak, or rice, or whatever, and you can definitely vary the ingredients as such (for instance, some red wine instead of mushroom liquid would work very well). Please note that, as with much of our cooking, we improvise, so many of these measurements are estimated after the fact.

Creamy Mushroom Gravy (enough for two servings of biscuits and gravy)

2 c. sliced mushrooms

1 ½ c. mushroom stock, warmed

5 tbsp. butter/bacon fat

2 tbsp. flour

¼ c. (or more to taste) heavy cream, half and half, or whole milk (yogurt would also work well here)

Fresh thyme, sage; minced

Black pepper and salt to taste

Handful of chopped scallions

In medium-sized pan, sauté mushrooms with thyme and sage in 2 tbsp. butter/bacon fat. Remove mushrooms from pan, reduce heat to medium-low, add 3 remaining tbsp. butter/bacon fat and melt. Whisk in flour until smooth. Whisk in mushroom stock; bring to boil; add mushrooms back to pan, along with black pepper, salt, sage, and thyme; reduce heat, and simmer until it begins to thicken. Whisk in cream, simmer a little longer until gravy is desired consistency. Pour over biscuits and top with chopped scallions.

Then dig in!