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

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> >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.

That, by the way, is the way that the Great Sausage Gravy Cooks of
Eisental all make it (except for Sarah bas Mordechai, who does an
excellent job with a different version, which involves throwing away the
drippings and making a white sauce with butter, flour and milk). I had to
make Sausage Gravy for last year's Landsknecht breakfast and rather than
trying it myself, I turned some of the oldest-inhabitant cooks loose in
the kitchen to make the stuff while I fried and moved stuff around.

Note:  they normally use sweet Italian sausage, and I agree that with this
method, plain or breakfast sausage -- which we had on hand-- made too
bland a gravy. We had to add seasonings to help it along. We encountered a
born Southerner who insisted that plain or breakfast sausage would be the
ONLY possible choice, but that seems to work better with the white-sauce
version.

-- Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists certainly as love and
generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to
your life its highest beauty and joy." -- Francis P. Church