Sausage gravy- was Re: [Sca-cooks] gravy

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Phlip:
>Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...
>
>>What do you mean by "dishes in themselves"? Is sausage gravy like
>>the ham gravy just mentioned in that it doesn't use flour?
>
>So far, I've found three ways to make sausage gravy.
>
>The way I was taught first, is the most difficult to do right. You fry up
>your sausage, add the milk, then add the flour to thicken, keeping it at a
>very low heat so you don't scorch the milk, until the flour cooks enough to
>thicken and lose its raw taste. It makes the whitest gravy, and the
>difficulty is preventing the milk from scorching- needs watched and stirred
>constantly.
>
>The second was one that I had been aware of, but had thought was an
>aberration until I was discussing it with Adamantius. In this one, you cook
>the sausage, then remove it from the pan, make a roux with the fat and the
>flour, add the milk and the sausage, and heat through. This one makes a much
>darker gravy, but should still be in the tan range. Have I got your method
>right, A?

What I normally do is a little more like your third method. I may 
have done something like the second as a result of feeling a little 
uncomfortable about just sprinkling flour into liquid. The fat is 
there anyway, and in good sausage it's not a huge amount of fat, so 
where's the harm in using it, and the finished product seems to be 
almost completely indistinguishable from the stuff made in the more 
traditional way.

I brown the meat (obviously the more you brown it the darker the 
gravy will be), stir the flour into the meat to distribute it evenly, 
cook it a little longer to get rid of Phlip's previously-mentioned 
raw taste, then add the liquid. I usually use about 90% milk and 10% 
cream, or sometimes all milk. (Heaven forbid the cholesterol level 
should drop below lethal levels.)

I didn't know there was a premium on whiteness of sausage gravy. I 
guess care taken not to brown the meat too darkly and a drop or two 
of cream should go a long way toward keeping it nice and pale.

Some people have been known to scoff at my Yankeefied version, but I 
can take comfort in the knowledge that at least I did not commit the 
ultimate sacrilege (I encountered this in a restaurant a while back): 
sliced little breakfast sausages --previously cooked-- in thin and 
mysteriously translucent white sauce tasting suspiciously of potato 
starch. In my darker moments I think it might have been made with 
non-dairy coffee creamer. This arrived on top of biscuits that tasted 
simultaneously like both talcum powder and foam rubber. I don't know 
how they managed it; if they had been trying their hardest to screw 
it up, it might have been better.

And I have been proclaimed an honorary Southerner on the strength of 
my biscuits, so I feel pretty safe.

Adamantius