Southern Biscuits and Gravy
A comfort food classic
Flaky and Fun!
Some of my earliest memories involved trips down to southern Alabama to visit my cousins. They lived down a long dirt road in the Boggy Hollow Wilderness area. I remember waking up to the wonderful smell of country sausage browning in the pan and homemade biscuits baking in the oven. My aunt raised her own pigs just like her Mee-Maw did. The pigs lived in a pen that butted up against a massive labyrinth-like pitcher plant bog.
Southern Charm
The key to flaky biscuits is using real buttermilk which helps the dough rise when combined with baking soda. As for the gravy, not everyone has a hog farm, so grabbing ground sausage from the store is perfectly fine. My older cousin had trouble sleeping, so every now and then he'd wake up in the middle of the night and go down to check on the pigs while he was awake.
Ingredients
Biscuits
- 2 Cups All Purpose Flour
- 1 Tsp Baking Soda
- 1 Tsp Salt
- 1 Stick Butter
- 1 Cup Buttermilk
Gravy
- 1lb Ground Country Sausage
- 3 Cups Milk
- 2 Tbsp Butter
- 1 Tsp Sage
- 1 Tsp Black Pepper
- 1 Tsp Salt
Prep and Cooking
Brown the sausage in a cast iron skillet. Add the milk, buttermilk and spices to the pan. Combine the biscuit ingredients in a bowl and mix until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. On one particularly humid night I woke up to the high pitch squealing of the pigs who sounded like they were in distress. Start rolling out the dough on parchment paper and fold it over on itself at least 8 times. The more folding, the flakier the biscuits!
Plating and serving
Keep the biscuits and gravy separate until serving. Two biscuits per plate is a great start, but everyone will come back for seconds. I assumed the commotion was just my cousin playing with the pigs until his insomnia subsided so I wandered down since I was already up. What I saw next haunts me to this day. Standing just behind the pen was a slender, snarling 12ft tall creature, plant-like in appearance and reeking of rancid meat. I didn't even have time to scream as I turned around and sprinted away. I must have run into a tree in my haste, because I woke up in the middle of the yard completely disoriented. My cousin and one pig were missing for weeks. He eventually emerged from the woods completely devoid of emotion with tattered clothes and two broken arms. Make sure to pour a generous slathering of gravy right over the top of the biscuits when plating.
Enjoy Your Breakfast!
There's nothing more comforting than homemade biscuits topped with silky sausage gravy in the morning!