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What is biscuits and gravy gravy made of?
A serving of biscuits and gravy, accompanied by home fries Biscuits and gravy is a popular breakfast dish in the United States, especially in the South, The dish consists of soft dough biscuits covered in white gravy (sawmill gravy), made from the drippings of cooked pork sausage, flour, milk, and often (but not always) bits of sausage, bacon, ground beef, or other meat.
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What is the secret to light fluffy biscuits?
Why It Works –
- Fully incorporating the butter and flour guarantees tender, airy biscuits every time.
- Low-protein flours keep biscuits fluffy and light, never tough.
- Yogurt provides both hydration and structure, for biscuits that bake up straight and tall but moist.
- Baking soda neutralizes some of the yogurt’s acidity, helping the biscuits to brown.
- Patting the dough by hand keeps the biscuits light, as a rolling pin can easily crush the soft dough.
I love biscuits. From their crispy bottoms to their buttery tops and all the fluffy bites in between, biscuits are perfect in every form—loaded with garlic and cheddar, dolloped over a dish of chicken pot pie, stuffed with ice cream and roasted strawberries, or simply buttered and enjoyed on their own.
Biscuits are a type of quick bread, which means you can throw them together fast—ideally with whatever ingredients you have around the house. Down south, buttermilk is the de facto foundation for biscuits, as it is in the recipe in my cookbook, Though it’s painful to admit, this isn’t necessarily because buttermilk makes the best biscuit, but because buttermilk is virtually omnipresent in our homes, as reliable as the light in the fridge.
Elsewhere, buttermilk is something of a specialty ingredient, which necessitates a different approach.
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What is the secret to an excellent biscuit?
The secret to excellent biscuits is COLD BUTTER. Really cold. Many times the biscuit dough gets worked so much that the butter softens before the biscuits even go in the oven. Try cutting the butter into small pieces and stick back in the fridge pulling out only when ready to incorporate into the dough.
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Is gravy just meat juice?
Answer – Gravy vs Sauce: – Gravy: Gravy is a sauce made from meat juices, usually combined with a liquid such as chicken or beef broth, wine or milk and thickened with flour, cornstarch, or some other thickening agent. A gravy may also be the simple juices left in the pan after the meat, poultry, or fish has been cooked.
- Learn how to make,
- Sauce: The word “sauce” is a French word that means a relish to make our food more appetizing.
- Sauces are liquid or semi-liquid foods devised to make other foods look, smell, and taste better, and hence be more easily digested and more beneficial.
- Because of the lack of refrigeration in the early days of cooking, meat, poultry, fish, and seafood didn’t last long.
Sauces and gravies were used to mask the flavor of tainted foods. Learn about the, : Gravy vs. Sauce
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Is biscuits and gravy just a southern thing?
Read the words “biscuits and gravy,” and an image of flaky, buttery biscuits topped with a decadent, sausage-studded cream gravy comes to mind. You can find some version of the dish served in diners and cafes, food trucks, fast-food outlets and even white-tablecloth restaurants the nation over — not just in the South, its birthplace.
- If you have any doubts about the dish’s ubiquity, just look in the frozen foods aisle of your local grocery store.
- The indulgent meal, beloved by people from all walks of life, is now ingrained in the fabric of America’s breakfast and brunch culture.
- But its origins were decidedly modest.
- Biscuits and gravy in some form may go back as early as the Revolutionary War, but many food writers and culinary historians position its birthplace in Southern Appalachia in the late 1800s.
Lumber was one of the main industries of the region, which supports the origin story that sausage gravy was also called sawmill gravy. It was the ideal cheap and calorie-dense fuel for sawmill workers lifting heavy logs all day long, and the perfect tool for making the era’s biscuits more palatable.
- America’s first biscuits were much sturdier than today’s delicate specimens.
- Called “beaten biscuits,” they got their leavening and smooth texture from being vigorously beaten and folded, according to John Egerton in ” Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History,” Making beaten biscuits was often the duty of enslaved cooks or domestic servants and could take well over an hour.
Once the free labor was no longer technically allowed via the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the process “had come to be viewed as too burdensome,” Egerton writes. A machine invented in 1877 “not only saved beaten biscuits from extinction but actually made them smoother, prettier, and more popular than before.” Around the same time, baking powder and soda became commercially available.
Combine this with the increased availability of flour, and the South became fertile ground for a new version of the biscuit to take root, giving cornbread a run for its money as the reigning quick bread of the region. Why did sausage gravy become their de facto companion? It was a simple matter of economics.
“Biscuits with ‘country’ or ‘white’ gravy scratched together from sausage, pan drippings, flour, and milk were affordably made from the foodstuffs that were in low supply after the American Revolutionary War,” writes Heather Arndt Anderson in ” Breakfast: A History,” When it entered the culinary canon, biscuits and gravy was for the poor, working class.
- Pork was always the protein of the poor,” Arndt Anderson said in an email.
- Sausage releases so much fat when cooked that a roux comes together easily in the drippings.” Yet for some, such as my own grandmother, even sausage and dairy were out of reach at times.
- Born in 1928 in tiny Rondo, Ark., my grandmother and her family lived on a farm among fields of cotton and other crops.
As customary for many farmers, their livelihood oscillated with the success of each harvest, resulting in either “fat” or “lean” times, as she put it. Regardless of where they found themselves on the pendulum of prosperity, biscuits were almost always on the breakfast table.
In a family of about 10, “Being the oldest daughter, it was my plight to get up and make biscuits if Mama didn’t do it,” she tells me. She would form a well in a mound of flour, baking powder and salt and add liquid to form a dough, which she kneaded, rolled out, cut and baked into the morning ‘ s rations.
Depending largely on if they had a cow that recently birthed a calf (or a generous neighbor willing to share), the liquid was either milk or water. “It was a treat for us to have biscuits with syrup and butter,” she said. The syrup came from the sorghum on their land, and the butter depended on the availability of dairy and the time of the year.
- Southern women made such an issue about baking cakes for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, they ‘ d save the butter,” she says.
- In the good times, ham and occasionally rice would make an appearance.
- But during the lean times, breakfast consisted of just biscuits and “thick gravy” — water thickened by a brown roux of oil and flour.
No sausage, and no cream. As Sara Roahen and John T. Edge write in ” The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook,” “The Southern way with gravies was born of privation., . . And when folks are poor, folks make do. Which means folks make gravy.” The South is home to many gravies, and virtually any of them could be served with biscuits.
Appalachian food authority Ronni Lundi talks of chipped beef and gravy and tomato gravy in her cookbook ” Victuals,” “The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook” includes recipes for Mississippi Chennai okra gravy, oyster gravy, Roan Mountain corn gravy, and, in what sounds like a Wonka-esque child’s fantasy, chocolate gravy.
Nicole Taylor, executive food editor at Thrillist, recalls first experiencing biscuits and gravy in her hometown of Athens, Ga., at the now-closed Katherine’s Kitchen, where her mother worked. “Biscuits were a treat,” Taylor says, and she ate them with ham steak and red-eye gravy, traditionally made from ham drippings and coffee.
Erika Council, esteemed biscuit queen and granddaughter of famous North Carolina restaurateur Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, on the other hand, says the gravy she ate with biscuits was of the sausage variety. (“North Carolina, home of Neese sausage,” she says.) Biscuits and gravy has been served over the years at her family’s revered Chapel Hill restaurant and is one of the best-selling items at her biscuit pop-ups in Atlanta.
“The sausage gravy, . . definitely requested often when we cater,” she says. Though biscuits and gravy started out as a humble regional dish, its presence has spread far and wide. In addition to human migration, the invention of refrigerated tube biscuits in 1930 made biscuits and gravy easier to prepare at home.
Eventually, the dish even took root on restaurant menus as far away as the Pacific Northwest. “As a staple of the poor, biscuits and gravy would never have appeared on fancy restaurant or hotel menus in Portland’s past,” Arndt Anderson wrote in an article for PDX Monthly. “By the early 1980s, though, seemingly out of nowhere, spots around town began casually advertising the B&G, as though it had always held the same breakfast menu real estate as bacon and eggs.” Cookbooks soon followed suit.
In “Southern Food,” published in 1987, Egerton writes about country gravy that “It is rare to find in any cookbook a recipe for this quite common and popular companion to hot biscuits,” but that is now no longer the case. “The Joy of Cooking,” which I view as the chronicle of American cooking, included a recipe in its 2006 edition.
Today, you can find it just about anywhere. With the handle @biscuits_and_gravy, George Drake Jr. has even dedicated an Instagram account to his encounters with the dish. (His favorite is from Loveless Cafe in Nashville.) “It has such a tradition, and you can have as much fun with it as you want,” said Drake, a freelance radio producer in Dayton, Ohio.
That means biscuits and lamb gravy at the Greek Street Dayton food truck; fried chicken, bacon and cheese on a biscuit topped with gravy from Pine State Biscuits in Portland, Ore.; and a dish called Fantasy Island at Leo ‘ s Diner in Omaha. The latter includes hash browns topped with biscuits and gravy, two eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, green pepper, onion and tomato.
- Vegetarian and vegan versions abound, too.
- Like lobster in years gone by or the chopped cheese sandwich more recently, biscuits and gravy has seen a rebranding, crossing geographic and cultural boundaries.
- Asked why the dish has achieved such celebrity status among its fellow breakfast options, Drake has a theory: “I think it just appeals to so many people,” he says.
“Way more than just pancakes.” Hutcherson is a cook and writer based in New York City.
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What is Americans biscuits and gravy?
Biscuits ‘n’ Gravy. A popular breakfast dish throughout the United States of America, especially in the Southern parts of the country, biscuits ‘n’ gravy consists of tender dough biscuits that are covered in a thick gravy, usually made from the drippings of pork sausages, flour, and milk.
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What makes biscuits more fluffy?
Secret to Fluffy Biscuits #1: Use cold butter – Cold butter is key to making your biscuits fluffy. Warm butter will be absorbed into the flour and prevent them becoming all fluffy. Its similar to making pie crust. Cold butter will not be fully absorbed by the flour which means you will have small chunks visible in the dough.
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What does cream of tartar do for biscuits?
joi 3.19 avg. rating ( 63 % score) – 203 votes 
Photo: Amy Traverso These cream of tartar biscuits have been one of NewEngland.com’s most popular recipes for years, and to be honest, we were a bit surprised by their popularity. This was, after all, just a biscuit recipe, right? Sure, the use of cream of tartar—an acidic, crystalline compound that’s a byproduct of wine making—was a novelty.
- Maybe that had a certain old-fashioned charm.
- But cream of tartar is commonly found in baking powder, where it’s combined with baking soda.
- So why not just use baking powder and skip the extra trip to the grocery store? Why did our readers like the recipe so much? Then we made the biscuits, and realized that our readers were on to something! And by updating the recipe a bit— replacing hard-to-find lard with unsalted butter and incorporating a folding technique that produces loftier layers—we found we had a real winner on our hands.
These cream of tartar biscuits are lighter, fluffier, and crisper at the edges, and a little bit of science explains why. You see, many biscuit doughs are made with baking powder as the leavening agent. And baking powder is typically made of 2 parts baking soda to 1 part cream of tartar.
- In the presence of a liquid, the acidity of the cream of tartar activates the baking soda, causing it to start bubbling away, and that, in turn, is what makes the biscuits rise.
- Now, if you look at the ratios in this recipe, you’ll see that we have 3 parts cream of tartar to 1 part baking soda.
- So the extra acidity in the mix gives a real boost to the soda, as evidenced in the way the biscuits puff right up.
The cream of tartar also adds a very subtle tang—similar to the tartness you get from using buttermilk. But since most of us don’t typically keep perishable buttermilk on hand, it’s actually easier to buy a jar of cream of tartar and make your biscuits this way, since it keeps indefinitely in your spice drawer.
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What does adding baking soda to biscuits do?
Baking soda reacts with acids in a recipe, neutralizing them and, in the process, creating carbon dioxide. Examples of acids include: buttermilk, brown sugar, lemon juice, or yogurt. The bubbles from the carbon dioxide cause the batter to rise. Without baking soda, cookies would be dense pucks and cakes would be flat.
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What are the 2 most important steps in the biscuit making process?
STEP 2: CUT IN YOUR FAT – The next step in The Biscuit Mixing Method is to “cut in” the fat into the dry ingredients. This process serves two purposes. The first is to coat the flour in fat helping to reduce gluten development. The second is to distribute little pieces of solid fat throughout the dough which will melt in the oven creating little pockets of flakiness. For these biscuits we are using very cold, real, unsalted butter cut into small pieces. Using a pastry cutter, or a fork if you don’t have a pastry cutter, “cut” the fat into the flour until it looks like coarse meal.
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Which liquid makes the best biscuits?
Selecting the liquid for your biscuits – Just as important as the fat is the liquid used to make your biscuits. Our Baking Powder Biscuits recipe offers the choice of using milk or buttermilk. Buttermilk is known for making biscuits tender and adding a zippy tang, so we used that for this test.
- Choices are important in baking, so we’ll also test variations with full-fat sour cream, half & half, and heavy cream.
- You can also use plain, full-fat Greek yogurt in place of sour cream if you like.) Each liquid has a different amount of water, fat, milk solids, and acidity — all of which can change the flavor and texture of your biscuits.
To see the effects of each liquid, we make a batch of all-butter biscuits and change only the liquid —testing buttermilk, sour cream, heavy cream, and half & half. (We leave milk out of these tests since milk and half & half should yield very similar results, with the half & half biscuits just slightly more tender). It’s surprising what changing just one ingredient can do! The heavy cream biscuit is slightly paler than the other three, while the half & half version is the evenly brown. The buttermilk and sour cream versions are somewhere in the middle in terms of color: nicely caramelized around the edges. You might be wondering, well, what about the height? Surprisingly, all four biscuits are about the same height, with the buttermilk version just a smidge taller than the rest. Turns out that fat affects the height and flakiness of biscuits, while liquid impacts the color more noticeably.
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What is a US biscuit called in England?
Scone (UK) / Biscuit (US) –
American do have things called biscuits too, but they are something completely different. These are the crumbly cakes that British people call scones, which you eat with butter, jam, sometimes clotted cream and always a cup of tea.
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- As the show reveals, a fascinating aspect of Canadian English is that it blends the three.
- One instance of this vocabulary mixture will jump out to any Canadian viewer: the use of “biscuit” in the “Biscuits and Bars” week of baking challenges.
- The term is straightforward enough, being transplanted directly from “Biscuit Week” in The Great British Bake Off, and is used in both series as in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) ‘s second definition of the word: “A small baked unleavened cake, typically crisp, crumbly, flat, and sweet, and usually made from a mixture of flour, sugar, butter, and flavourings.” This term has a complex pattern of usage in Canada, however, which is implicitly acknowledged in season 2, episode 2 (S2:E2), when host Julia Chan introduces the theme of the week as “biscuits and bars, also known as cookies and squares.” This alternate term, “cookie,” has enough currency in Canada that the term “biscuit” needs such a disclaimer, lest a Canadian baker or viewer misunderstand the challenge.
- We have a clear picture, then: “cookie” and “biscuit” can refer to the same thing in Canada, but “cookie” is dominant for the sweet, flat item, and “biscuit” can also refer to the North American biscuit.
- The way the Canadian series has accommodated for this vocabulary quirk is to keep the usage in line with the British original, while also accommodating the North American term.
- But Italian chefs will tell you that is what’s called a Ragu.
- Linguistically speaking “sauce” is probably a more accurate term, as it comes from the Italian word “salsa” – which means “topping”.
- Some Italians will tell you that “gravy” was a term that their grandmother used for Sunday sauce because it is what they served at big family gatherings after mass.
- If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because it sounds a bit like hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen in blood.
- Yes, there’s that word again, but myoglobin isn’t blood (honest!) – instead, its job is to transport oxygen through muscle.
- Myoglobin looks like blood on your plate because, like hemoglobin, the iron in myoglobin turns red when it is exposed to oxygen.
What is a cracker called in England?
Names – In American English, the name “cracker” usually refers to savory or salty flat biscuits, whereas the term ” cookie ” is used for sweet items. Crackers are also generally made differently: crackers are made by layering dough, while cookies, besides the addition of sugar, usually use a chemical leavening agent, may contain eggs, and in other ways are made more like a cake.
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What do Canadians call biscuits?
The Great Canadian Baking Show and the ‘Biscuit/Cookie’ Question by Jet McCullough December 9, 2020 The unique character of Canadian English vocabulary is apparent in The Great Canadian Baking Show, This reality show baking competition has a choice to make regarding baking terms: whether to use British terms, as does the original series upon which the Canadian show is based, North American terms (those common to the US and Canada), or Canadianisms, terms specific to Canada.
In fact, “cookie” appears to be the dominant term in Canada and North America broadly, according to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD), which marks the word ” N. Amer. ” (“cookie, n.1.”), and the OED, which notes that “In North America cookie is the usual term for the flat, sweet, crisp or chewy items known outside of North America as biscuits” (“cookie, n.1.”).
This complexity is also partially caused by the prevalence of the alternate, North American meaning of the word “biscuit”, “a small round savoury cake of bread, similar to a scone in appearance, and typically made from a mixture of flour, fat, and a raising agent” (“biscuit, n.1.b.”, OED ). The COD points to the term “tea biscuit,” which it labels as a Canadianism, for this meaning (“biscuit, n.2.,” “tea biscuit”).
The COD also indicates the regional origins of the relevant meanings of “cookie” and “biscuit” in each word’s definition: “biscuit” can mean ” Brit. a cookie,” and “cookie” can refer to ” N. Amer, a small sweet biscuit.” It appears that “biscuit” has the potential to refer to two things in Canada, but what about “cookie”? We have the COD definition, “a small, sweet biscuit,” and this is how the term is used in The Great Canadian Baking Show,
What does it mean elsewhere in the world? There is evidence of this North American meaning of the word having reached other varieties of English, but only in a specific sense. In The Great Comic Relief Bake Off, a spin-off series of The Great British Bake Off, there is discussion of whether contestant Claudia Winkleman’s chocolate bakes “snap” or are “cookie-like,” and after the judges pull one apart and see that it is soft and not snappy, they say, “It’s a cookie” (S1:E4).
Indeed, the North American term, “cookie”, seems to be used in otherwise biscuit-dominated sweet bake contexts to mainly refer to the soft cookie/biscuit: “Outside of North America cookie is now also used to refer to sweet biscuits having a fairly soft, chewy texture and to crumbly biscuits containing chocolate chips” (“cookie, n.1.”, OED ).
: The Great Canadian Baking Show and the ‘Biscuit/Cookie’ Question
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Why do Italians call sauce gravy?
Do Italians Call it Sauce, Gravy, or Ragu? Ahh, the age-old debate among connoisseurs of Italian cuisine. Is it called Sauce? Is it called gravy? Is it a Ragu? Maybe it’s a sugo Yes is the answer. You can research this topic all day long and find that Italian-Americans connote “gravy” to mean a sauce with meat in it.
If someone said, “where’s the gravy?” they were looking for the sauce or topping. Some hot-headed, Italian-Americans that are multiple generations detached from their heritage will tell you prolifically that gravy is a brown substance they put over their meat and potatoes and you’re a f*****g idiot if you think it’s anything else.
The passage from sugo/salsa to sauce/gravy must have occurred when immigrant families settled into new neighborhoods in the U.S. and became an Italian-American family/neighborhood tradition more than anything else. Geography has probably played a large role in the debate about where the term gravy came from.
Early immigrants eager to assimilate to their American counterparts may have adopted the term gravy on the East Coast – we’ve all heard the term Brooklyn Gravy.
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Is steak juice cow blood?
What is the liquid coming out of steak? – Even the rarest and reddest of steaks is actually bloodless. Instead, what you’re looking at is a combination of water, which makes up about 75 per cent of meat, and a protein found in muscle tissue called myoglobin.
That’s why muscle tissue is red. Most mammals have plenty of myoglobin in their tissue, which is why meat that comes from mammals – including beef, lamb and pork – is known as ‘red meat’, and meat that comes from animals with low levels of myoglobin (like most poultry) or no myoglobin at all (like some sea life) is known as ‘white meat’.
Animals that are harvested at a younger age tend to have less muscle tissue, and therefore less myoglobin, than older animals. Cows tend to be harvested at an older age than pigs, for example, which is why the liquid that leaks from a steak is a darker red – and looks more like blood – than the liquid that leaks from pork.
Myoglobin can lose its red colour due to chemical changes over time, which is why meat that has been sitting at the supermarket or resting in your refrigerator for a few days will start to turn brown. This doesn’t necessarily mean the meat has gone bad, though, so in these cases, it’s better to use the sniff test than the eye test.
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