Sawmill gravy

At the risk of offending multiple food groups (in the sense of those of us who eat food), let me offer up one of the more satisfying meals I’ve made in the past year. About six weeks ago I purchased Welcome To The Buttermilk Kitchen a cookbook by Suzanne Vizethann who operates a restaurant in the Atlanta area called Buttermilk Kitchen. The above photo is of a Southern staple: sawmill gravy over biscuits, i.e., “biscuits and gravy.” The gravy can be of several varieties, but the most common is a béchamel-type base with sausage in it.

It works like this: take five frozen sticks of European butter (the kind with a higher fat content than American butter); grate it coarsely. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and then fold in the grated butter “until mixture resembles sand.” My patience level has never achieved this standard. Add 2.75 cups (1.33 pints) of “high quality, full-fat” buttermilk. Drop them on baking sheet with a 4-inch ice cream scoop and bake.

I use Michael Ruhlman’ From Scratch to make my own breakfast sausage. (If you’re into cooking, I heartily recommend this book. It takes 10 basic meals and riffs off of them with dozens of recipes for each one. For example, the sausage recipe–ridiculously simple–is in Chapter 2 which is “The Omelet”.) The Sawmill Gravy recipe starts off like a basic béchamel, veers this way: 5 cups of chicken stock and 2 cups of heavy cream. The “4 dashes of Tabasco” is perhaps not in your béchamel either. The rest is obvious. Split a biscuit. Ladle gravy over it. Sprinkle with parsley if you’ve got it. Eat. Retire to porch/living room/deck. Loosen pants. Snooze.

Repeat as necessary.