Five-Ingredient Biscuits and Sausage Gravy | Kenji’s Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji i'm here at home and i'm going to show you how to make biscuits and sausage gravy this is a american breakfast staple if you aren't from the u.s some of this might seem strange to you um especially our use of the term biscuit when we say biscuit we mean something similar to what you might call a scone in england although they tend to be moister and moister than a scone and can be either sweet or savory um i'm gonna make a very simple biscuit this whole actually everything is very simple all we need the only ingredients are flour baking powder salt heavy cream sausage black pepper for the gravy that's it that's all the ingredients for for everything we're making today so to start with i'm going to put about a cup of flour if you want to be precise about this you can do five ounces of flour um you know or multiples thereof but i'm just going to put about a cup of flour i generally eyeball this one because it's so easy um and for every cup of flour you're gonna put in one and a half teaspoons of baking powder about one and a half you go and about about a quarter teaspoon or so of kosher salt okay i'm going to mix that together with my hand and then for a cup of flour so a couple flour always 5 ounces you want to use the same amount of heavy cream by weight as the flour so about 5 ounces of heavy cream again i'm going to eyeball this because i've done it a bunch of times you can weigh it out if you want but the important part is the finished texture of this dough so we're looking for something that kind of comes together there you go sort of shaggy ball like that not too stiff not wet just a kind of shaggy ball just like that um so these are called cream biscuits um they are the easiest kind of biscuit you can make oh this is all-purpose flour if you have you know pastry flour cake flour your biscuits will come out a little bit lighter if you have something like um oh what's that southern brand i i can't remember white lily white lily that's the one if you have white lily flower they'll come out even more tender um but all-purpose flour works out just fine um the advantage of a cream biscuit is that you don't have to you know with a biscuit made with butter and buttermilk normally you would cut your butter into small pieces you'd have to work it into the flour and then you'd add your buttermilk and very sort of gently push it together into a dough a cream biscuit is much more forgiving all that butter fat is built into the into it already so you don't have to separately add any butter fat um you know you don't have to separately add any butter because all the fats in there already um it makes it much much easier the the end results are a little bit different of course than a than a typical buttermilk biscuit but i think they're very delicious um so now i'm just going to push this down by hand this a cup of flour is enough to make about three biscuits by the way so you can double this and make six biscuits of course it all depends also depends on the size so now with these biscuits you could cut them out with a biscuit biscuit cutter like a pastry cut or something like that you could also stamp them out with a a cup but i'm just gonna cut these with a knife because i don't care for them i don't care if they're perfectly circular or not that is it i'm going to take these now plop them onto a tray and then these are going to go into a 400 degree preheated oven how long are they going to take probably 15 minutes or so 12 to 15 minutes in the meantime we're gonna make our sausage gravy so this is another term that might confuse uh some non-americans because um we call this gravy but it's different from what you would call gravy in the uk um or in other parts of the world you know generally um like in england gravy is brown gravy it's a meat based thing we also have that style of gravy here you know like our thanksgiving gravy is turkey stock that's thickened with thickened with a brew but we also have we call white gravy or country gravy is essentially a bechamel which is a thickened milk mixture in this case i'm just going to thicken some heavy cream because the heavy cream is already out and this is one of those recipes that uses barely any ingredients um and so to make sausage gravy we start with sausage so this is um this is regular old breakfast sausage from the supermarket you can use you know whatever brand you like i think this is probably i don't i don't remember this might be like the whole foods brand or maybe it's the safeway brand but you know you can use jimmy dean something like that um american breakfast sausage is a very fatty pork sausage that's generally flavored with black pepper and sage so if you're not in the u.s and you can't get american style breakfast sausage first of all you can make some you're on your own i have a recipe for it in my book in the food lab you can make it on your own or or you can get my recipe on serious eats.com essentially you would take nice fatty ground pork add about two percent uh one and a half to two percent by weight salt um and then about one percent ground sage uh and black pepper um about one percent of each of those and then mix them all together um i like to add a little bit of maple syrup for flavor as well as a touch of sugar and a little pinch of red pepper flakes too and then you kind of mix that all together until this the meat starts to get kind of sticky you nee you need it essentially like you're needing bread dough in a bowl and just just the same way that bread dough gets stickier and stickier the more you need it sausage does as well as the salt sort of dissolves muscle proteins then they start cross-linking um that's what gives sauces that sort of bouncy springy texture when it's cooked so that's that's basic breakfast sausage and you can use it just like this of course you don't have to use breakfast sausage you can use any flavor of sausage you want i've made this with you know we have we i i'm the chef at a sausage restaurant at a german style beer hall so we um we have a lot of sausage scraps because the big piston stuffers that pushes uh pushes the sausage into the casing when you get down to the bottom of it there's always a little bit left in the tube that can't be pushed into the casing so we always have sausage scraps of various flavors you know we make eight different kinds of sausage at any given time so sausage scraps of various flavors kicking around all the time there so i've made sausage gravy with italian sausage i've made it with um ground uh we do a um a pastrami sausage ground pastrami sausage it works with all kinds of flavors but the classic is american style breakfast sausage so i'm just going to brown this off in a skillet looks like it's not quite as fatty as i like it so i'm going to add just a touch of butter to this and by the way you don't even have to have any sausage in your biscuits and gravy um you could also just make a straight up white gravy so to do that i would take butter uh you know a couple tablespoons of butter and a couple tablespoons of flour along with a few really good serious cracks of black pepper and cook them in a skillet just like this stirring it with a whisk until the butter until the mixture um you know the flour gets rid of its sort of raw flavor and starts to turn a little bit pale blond and then very slowly whisk in two cups of milk um and then bring that up to a simmer so that it thickens and that would be your basic black pepper cream gravy or as it's known in you know most most other cuisines uh bechamel bechamel bechamela white sauce whatever you want to call it don't ask me why we call these biscuits um i i honestly don't know you know the original biscuit comes from the comes from french i believe but it means um twice cooked um and so generally like a biscuit is a it's something sort of well if you if you think about italian you're familiar with italian biscotti which is uh the same root word means twice cooked and it's um like a cookie that's basically baked once sliced and then baked again until it dries out and gets crispy whereas american style biscuits um are only cooked a single time although in the uk when you say biscuits you're really talking about what we call well certain types of cookies so i don't know why they call it those biscuits either here's the real answer is that everyone is wrong all the time all right so that sausage is browned i'm gonna get some flour um when you're making us cream gravy with actual cream instead of milk you don't need quite as much flour because cream has you know cream is kind of thick on its own and actually that cream was only half half full so i guess i'll use a combination if i had a full thing of cream i would have been able to make those biscuits and this gravy all with one go all in one go but i will use a combination of heavy cream and milk so a little bit more flour so i'd say i have about a tablespoon and a half of flour in there total and i'm going to add about i think i have like a third of a cup of cream here so i'll do like a third of a cup of cream and a little over a cup of milk so we incorporate that flower where'd my where my whisk at here we go someone's always taking whisks around here so when adding liquid to um a bechamel a white sauce you always add it slowly make sure it's fully incorporated before you go ahead and add more and initially it's going to get real real thick and that's fine go in a splash at a time um now the thing to remember when you're making a white sauce like this well one of many things to remember one of one of a moderately moderate list of things to remember um is that it doesn't fully thicken until it comes to a boil so if it seems too thin at first when you've added you know when you've added some liquid and it seems thinner than you want it make sure you let it come up to a simmer before you make that judgment to add more more liquid or not and you can always make this as thin or as thick as you like let's see how our biscuits are doing getting there getting there some people like their gravy nice and thick some people prefer to keep it nice and loose i'm not going to judge you either way i will judge you if you let other people tell you what your gravy should be like though these biscuits by the way um and american style biscuits in general when you bake them [Music] the tops are going to get you know sort of pale golden a little bit brown on top if you want them to have a nice you know real rich deep dark gold color brush them before you start baking them brush them with either some melted butter or you can brush them with a little bit of straight up heavy cream either one of those is going to help the tops brown more deeply if you care about such things when i'm making you know if i was going to serve the biscuits as their own thing on the side i might care but um in a dish like this where they're going to get literally doused with a creamy sauce and you're not going to see the tops anymore i really don't care so i'm not going to bother all right that's about think about the right amount of milk if you if you add too much milk by the way you can always you can always let it reduce a little bit um and thicken up but let's taste that and see where we're at yummy need some definitely need some salt use a little more black pepper i like to go heavy on pepper you can also if you want um you can always add something like onions or garlic to your gravy i know some people would think that's sacrilegious but if you want to do it is how we doing in close all right what i'm going to do is i'm going to shut this off i'm going to cover up the camera and i'm going to uncover it in a few minutes um all right and our biscuits are done this took about 12 minutes total nice and golden nice and fluffy and light all right oh yeah look at that so i'll pretend i did that on purpose so i could show you the interior texture of these see how nice and fluffy they come out the magic of magic of cream biscuits all right get onto a plate all right now in with our gravy and you really just want to smother them if you want of course you can split the biscuits open some people do that um and i just ran out while we were when i was waiting those for those biscuits to finish i ran out and grabbed some chives from the garden there's no need to put any kind of green garnish on this if you don't feel like it i would not expect it but it doesn't hurt all right and here we have it biscuits and sausage gravy and an american diner or home classic um so if you're unfamiliar with american biscuits this is what they are and if you're unfamiliar i'm familiar with sausage gravy this is what that is sit good girl and here you go come on good boy all right everyone [Music] guys gals non-binary pals stay safe eat well be nice to each other and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 467,014

Rating: 4.9459038 out of 5

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Id: BoFkDmTm2uc

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020