Get Your Grill On

Sausage gravy is perfect as it is, right?

Well, it’s great, but, as with most things, it can always be improved. I think I found one way to improve this class, though.

It all starts with the foundation ingredients. Sausage gravy is one of the simplest things to make, whether it’s done with sausage crumbled in a skillet or patties that are cooked and removed from the skillet. The ingredients are pretty standard:

• 3-4 cups of whole milk
• 2 tablespoons (or so) of flour
• Salt and pepper to taste (though I often leave out the salt as the sausage is generally salty enough)
• 1 pound of country sausage
• Maybe some sage, maybe not

That’s it… And a great thing about making this stuff is that none of this needs to be measured too closely. The sausage is simple; get a local sausage in a one pound tube, or ask for a pound of sausage from the butcher.

Here’s where mine is different from any others I’ve seen, and how it fits in with Get Your Grill On… I make fatties almost every time I do a long smoke. What’s a fatty? No, it has nothing to do with illegal substances (though some vegans I know would like to make it illegal!). A fatty is simply a roll of sausage that’s smoked instead of fried.

There are 3 obvious advantages to this method of cooking sausage:

1. I don’t have to clean up the kitchen after frying all that sausage (can you say ‘grease splatter’?). This also means I can, if I choose, make sausage gravy in the nude… But don’t worry, I only cook fully clothed!
2. A lot more fat is rendered out of the whole equation by smoking than by frying in a skillet and reusing the fat. This is easy to determine simply by weighing before and after cooking. Fatties are actually less fatty than their fried counterparts.
3. The wood smoke flavor added takes ordinary country style pork sausage and makes is sing! No, not literally, but ask anyone that’s had a well-smoked fatty what they think of it, and the vast majority will side with smoking a fatty as the preferred way of cooking sausage.

So I made a fatty on Saturday to use on Sunday for breakfast, which I then chopped up into small chunks and added to a hot skillet. This is mostly to heat the sausage than to cook it more. One thing I notice when I do this is that there’s not any fat in the skillet, which is a good thing. There’s enough fat in the sausage to keep it from sticking, but not so much that I have any puddles in the skillet. Once the meat is heated, I add a couple of tablespoons or so of all purpose flour and brown that with the sausage. It’s important to let the flour brown well, as the gravy will taste like raw flour if the milk is added too soon.

Once the flour is browned, the milk can be added. This is the part where beginning sausage gravy makers commit their biggest mistake… not adding enough milk. I add as much as I think I need, then add a cup or more extra. What happens is that the flour will thicken everything, and the gravy will be too thick if not enough milk is added. The good thing is that milk can always be added if the gravy is too thick, so it’s not like this is a mistake that’s not correctable.

Once the milk starts to thicken, I add a pretty good amount of black pepper, as I think the pepper really makes the gravy. With a pepper mill, I add a good dusting of pepper over the whole skillet.

The gravy will brown a bit and thicken, and then it’s ready! That’s all there is to it!