Good Gravy, Not This

It's a long way from sculpting a cake into a Chanel purse, as we saw in the last post, to finding this plate of shocking proportions. Let's not get into how I went from the classroom at Le Cordon Bleu to a small town up north near the Del Monte processing plant. We'll hash that in another post. For now, I am mystified how any roadside attraction could call this dish breakfast, much less an order of biscuits and gravy. What you see is what it is.

Let's assess blame. Should I have said I wanted gravy on the side, that it was important to me to see the biscuits? This unfathomable plating suggests that the biscuits are so bad, they cannot be shown. Is this a cultural thing, the literal translation of mopping up? Or is this how they like things in Illinois?

I'm having trouble putting into words what is so upsetting about this food. I had trouble putting it in my mouth. It's bad in every category worth scoring, according to me, the one who sent the Bloody Mary back at an airport bar because the celery fainted.

Good or bad, gravy should never cover an entire plate, nor should it resemble mashed potatoes. A good gravy stands on its own, never swims or worse, crawls.

Grady Spears has a terrific cracked-pepper gravy from A Cowboy in the Kitchen, using 5 tablespoons of flour to 1/4 cup unsalted butter and enough milk, salt and pepper to achieve creamy, hearty results.

But I digress, since my subject is the plate of breakfast from hell's kitchen. Let's hurl invective at the gravy.

Pan gravy is a sauce made with drippings of the meat or poultry with which it's being served. Similar to brown sauce, it's usually made from pan drippings and roux, plus stock, water or even milk or cream. Can you have a gravy without the drippings? Of course, as seen in the example above, where the cook threw in sausage.

The idea is to get a good balance between fat and flour, so that they thicken beautifully whatever liquid you use. A classic roux for thickening is a mixture of equal parts by weight of fat and flour, which is then cooked slightly as part of the gravy-making process. Notice I didn't say the fat and flour are the same amounts. There must be enough fat to coat all the starch granules, but not too much fat or it floats to the top and looks greasy.

As to the biscuits, please don't present them like the contents of a cat box. If you have to cover them up, you're making them wrong. If that's the way your momma did it, momma was wrong.

Use any reference you like, starting with cookbooks and online resources, but use something other than what you're using now.

And if you're the diner visiting roadside attractions, learn from your mistakes and ask good questions or, if the waitstaff looks harassed beyond belief, then see what they can do with waffles.

Note to Self: Stop ordering biscuits and gravy out of town.