A big steaming bowl of hate.....

I hate restaurant breakfasts. There, I said it. With few exceptions, including Kerby Lane in Austin and Mother’s in New Orleans, breakfast food in restaurants just plain sucks. It doesn’t have to, but it does. Mind you that my first leap from dishwasher to line cook happened when the entire line walked out one Friday night and I was the last person left working – flipping pancakes in a Perkins.

What brought on this tirade? Well, my wife and I spent this weekend in Daytona Beach, a stinky armpit of a seaside hellhole. (They’re my metaphors; I’ll mix them as I choose.) My hopes were far from high in regards to finding anything even halfway decent to eat in that run down tourist trap. But then, there’s this diner, an authentic 50’s came-on-a-rail-car aluminum diner. I perked up and turned away from the door of IHOP and thought, “surely a real diner has real food, it’ll probably be pretty good”. This particular diner has local ties that I won’t reveal and I’d never tried the food at the local version, so I was without proper forewarning as to the quality.

I judge breakfast by the quality of their biscuits and gravy. Yeah, a big steaming plate of clogged arteries. Locally, I’ve found exactly one place that serves a decent plate of them – Martha’s. This is such a simple freakin’ dish, it’s almost impossible to screw it up, but most do. Biscuits and gravy usually suck and I usually leave the joint in a bad mood. This place went beyond that, I didn’t finish a single thing that I ordered because it was just bad. This included the coffee.

Country gravy has the potential to be creamy, pork filled nectar. It’s usually a starchy, barely flowing blob with no flavor, save uncooked flour. With something so simple, why do people feel the need to cut even more corners? Christ, it takes 30 minutes to make, start to finish and it will be good. Guess that’s just not fast enough. Wanna make some?

Grab a tube of sausage, any sausage, like Jimmy Dean. Brown the sausage really well in a medium sized saucepan. Render the fat out of the sausage, the fat is flavor, you need it. Grab a whisk and add about ¼ cup of flour. Stir the flour into the fat and sausage until it’s smooth and about the consistency of wet sand. Let this cook for about 2-3 minutes, stirring pretty frequently to avoid burning. This is called a roux – which is French for fat and flour napalm.

Now add about 1 quart of whole milk. Stir this whole mess to make it smooth. Bring the milk up to a simmer and you’ll see the whole thing start to change. It’s going to start getting thick. If it’s too thick, add a little more milk, but this should be pretty thick. Let this cook for about 20 minutes, until the gravy loses its floury taste. Add some salt to taste, and an assload of black pepper- preferably fresh ground. Pour it over some biscuits, potatoes, eggs, a burrito, fill a coffee cup with it and drink it, whatever. That’s all there is to it. If you can make this non-suck gravy at home, why can’t some knucklehead in a diner do the same?