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Hey there southern food goons. I'm about to start development on a biscuits and gravy recipe and was hoping to get y'all's opinions before I get started. I'll be doing plenty of experimenting and can end up answering most of these, but would love a head start with advice from some goons. Biscuits. For biscuits and gravy, is the buttermilk biscuit still king even for this application? I imagine that I'll end up with some butter content still, but we have a pretty good supply of lard, and an absolutely overwhelming amount of tallow, so going to need to use a good bit of both. Current thinking is to use lard for the gravy roux, and tallow/butter for the biscuits. Any thoughts? Sausage. I'll be making the sausage from scratch, and am currently planing on a pretty standard country breakfast sausage. Sage, black and red-pepper heavy. Any special considerations I should keep in mind here? Finer than usual grind ideal? Higher/lower than the usual sausage ratio of 70:30 lean:fat? I'm planning on giving at least 24 hours after making before use to let flavors do their thing, but does anyone think longer is better? I feel like dried sage is the classic, but schmancy recipes online all call for fresh. Was thinking about using both. Thoughts? Gravy. I'm aiming for a very traditional sausage gravy, heavy on the black pepper. I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on this one already, but would love input if anyone has a secret that they think makes a big difference. Doom Rooster fucked around with this message at 21:42 on May 19, 2020 |
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May 19, 2020 21:40
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 12:53 |
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Biscuits and gravy development trip report. Landed on final* recipes after 22 batches of biscuits, 5 batches of sausage and 8 batches of gravy. Random thoughts/learnings: Buttermilk is indeed, absolutely king. We tried an early recipe without, and didn't love it, then tried our final buttermilk recipe with whole milk swapped in and some levener adjustments, and it was "fine", but I would only ever make it if I just straight up could not get my hands on buttermilk. We ended up using 100% tallow since we have a ton of it and it tasted great. Just about any fat can make a biscuit that is both recognizable as a biscuit, and tasty though. Butter is really the only one that takes special consideration as far as technique goes due to the water content. I even made a batch with unrefined coconut oil as the fat, and it was delicious. Terrible with sausage gravy, but I'll find a good use case for it at some point. Maybe strawberry "shortcake". Just about every sausage I have ever made, and every legit recipe I have ever seen, calls for ~10% liquid. This is the right call for cased sausages, and even for breakfast sausage you plan on slicing into patties and eating. It's the wrong call for sausage you specifically plan on crumbling and browning though. By the time all of the water is released and cooked off, all of the protein that came out with the water forms a layer on the bottom of the pan and burns before you get any brown on the actual sausage crumbles. This doesn't happen in a nonstick pan, but we only have 8" nonsticks for eggs, and need to make a massive batch in a 22" stainless rondeau. Normally, I would grind in some backfat or belly to get the fat content of the sausage up to 30%ish, but that would be kind of a pain in the rear end here. I ended up going with straight shoulder, which for crumbling works fine, it just doesn't leave enough grease on its own for roux making. This was a blessing in disguise, because I decided to try supplementing with a little bit of the apple/oak smoked tallow we still had lying around. It's loving incredible. The smoke flavor is pretty volatile, and there's not a TON of it in the gravy to begin with, so after cooking, the gravy didn't taste "smokey", so much as it was just a very pronounced savoriness that was night and day from the other batches. I have 40lbs of brisket trim in the smoker rendering right now to make sure we can keep doing this forever. I also highly recommend you plan on using a lot of black pepper in your gravy, but split it in half. I found a really positive difference when I bloomed half of the pepper in the sausage/beef fat before adding the flour for the roux. More detail below, but flour type is much less important than process and fat type. We ended up using Sir Galahad flour in our final recipe, even though it's technically a HIGH protein flour, which is anathema to conventional biscuit wisdom. It's the only flour that we normally use for other applications, so it was great to find that with the rest of my recipe done properly, it was indistinguishable from AP. *the only thing left to try on the biscuits is to use butter flavored popcorn salt, to see if getting butter flavor while using only tallow, works. I have low expectations, but maybe I'll be surprised. ThePopeOfFun posted:I'm going to try out a low protein flour like White Lilly. "Northern" biscuits don't taste the same, because most flour up here has higher protein. Probably worth your time. mediaphage posted:If you don’t overwork your dough you really don’t need to track down white lily. I use canadian AP flours (and also whole wheat, even), which are stronger than most US flours, to make my biscuits and they always turn out great. ThePopeOfFun posted:I'll have to try out the different flours. I'm pretty convinced a lower protein flour is going to make a difference, even after accounting for technique. Whether that difference is better or not dunno Mediaphage is right, but there is also a little more to it than just overworking. If you are using butter, which is usually 10-15% water, overworking is a major concern, and should be avoided at all costs. If you are using lard/tallow/shortening/any 100% fat and work it in well before adding buttermilk, it becomes much less of an issue. Our tallow is pretty soft, so it's super easy to really thoroughly coat all of the flour with it, which provides even more insurance against gluten development. After settling on final proportions, I did a large batch that I split into three smaller batches. First batch I made using the standard "mix until it's a shaggy dough, then gently pat it together into shape and cut". The second I purposefully mixed until it was a completely homogeneous dough, then rolled it out into shape. Third batch I straight up kneaded like a wet sourdough bread for a solid two minutes before forming. Batches 1 and 2 were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Batch 3 was definitely a little tough and dry, but honestly not too bad. This is great because in case of emergency, we can grab a line cook who has never made them before, follow the recipe with just "mix until dough comes together completely, but do not overwork." and still have a great product come out. ThePopeOfFun posted:I throw an acid in everything, and I'd throw it in gravy, too. Not enough to pick it out. You could do lemon, vinegar, buttermilk. I guess your biscuits could have it if you went with buttermilk. I just hate boring gravy. I am definitely familiar with the effect of acids, and their usual benefits. I pulled a half batch of gravy, and did side by sides against the control batch. I did increasing 0.02% increments of citric acid in sub batches. By the time we could even recognize a difference from the control at 0.08%, we didn't like it as much. By 0.1% we really didn't like it. We greatly preferred the only sourness to come from the buttermilk biscuits. If your cream gravy is boring, it's a problem with the amount of flavor is your sausage, or not enough pepper or salt, not a lack of sourness. With fresh garlic, garlic powder, fresh sage, dried sage, onion powder, red pepper flakes, cayenne, black pepper, salt, sugar and MSG, boring is NOT a word I would use to describe our final product. All in all, this has been a really fun recipe to develop. Biscuits and gravy has always held a pretty special place in my heart, so I tried to stick to a very traditional flavor profile, but really nail it.
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May 31, 2020 19:00
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