Biscuits And Gravy

This morning the family woke up with a hankering (craving) for good ol’ biscuits and gravy, the quintessential southern breakfast dish.  So for any of our International Followers, or even for those who may live above the Mason-Dixon line in the United States, who might be thinking, “What the heck is a biscuit and gravy?”…..well… I’m gonna tell ya.

As you all may know by now, I married an Aussie man, and lived in Australia for nearly 5 years.  When I asked my hubby if he would like some biscuits and gravy for breakfast, he gave me the most horrified look and said “What?”  Now keep in mind, in Australia and most other parts of the world a BISCUIT is what Australians call a COOKIE, and no, they don’t have frozen or refrigerated Pilsbury in their cold section.  And their gravy is the brown gravy that we would put in a roast, and not the white gravy that we use for biscuits or fried chicken here in the south.  So you gotta picture it in his mind, I’m asking if he wants cookies with brown roast gravy…. for breakfast!…. Now I understand his confused reaction completely, but I told him to trust me, and with some fear and trepidation he agreed to “Give it a fair shake of the stick”, as he would say….and its now one of his favorite things in the world.

So for our Aussie/New Zealand and UK followers, a biscuit is essentially what YOU would call a scone (not the same scones as we have in America, yes it can be confusing), but probably lighter and fluffier and more suited for savory fillings, than your scones.  Just like you have the sausage and egg McMuffin, in America we also do sausage and egg biscuits.

Now, the white gravy is generally made from a roux or a basic bechamel, which is usually made from flour and some kind of fat, with liquid added to thin it out. Southern gravy has a few names, white gravy, milk gravy, cream gravy, sausage gravy, sawmill gravy, breakfast gravy, but initially they’re pretty much all the same thing. A southern white gravy starts with the excess fat from the cooked down bacon or breakfast sausage (or both),  and you make a roux with some flour and  add either milk or cream to thin it out.  Simple as that.

So now you know what biscuits and gravy are.  How does one ketofy this recipe, after all, biscuits are flour and white gravy is made from flour.  Well after a lot of trial and error, we’ve come up with a great recipe which is more than going to scratch that biscuits and gravy itch.  If you’re already a biscuit fan, you’re going to love these biscuits.  I promise that these are actually like REAL biscuits, not drop biscuits, but real biscuits.  They are light, they are fluffy, they are cuttable with a knife, you can spread jelly(jam) on them without them disintegrating in your hand.  And best of all, they taste like a real buttermilk biscuit.  Check out our kitchen tip below for how we emulated the taste of buttermilk.
So like it, love it, or not….“It’s A Southern Thing Y’all”

BISCUIT INGREDIENTS:

• 1 3/4 cups almond flour – cannot use almond meal
• 3/4 cup unflavored whey protein isolate – must be isolate
• 3/4 cup buttermilk substitute – see KITCHEN TIP below
• 1/2 cup of lard or butter (frozen) we prefer lard or manteca for this recipe
• 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
• 1.5 TBSP Baking Powder – yes this is correct.
• 1/4 tsp pink himalayan sea salt

BISCUIT INSTRUCTIONS:

• Pre Heat Oven to 400F.
• Take Lard/Butter out of the freezer and grate on large holes of the grater.  Put back into freezer until needed.
• Make buttermilk substitute(see KITCHEN TIP below)
• In a medium size mixing bowl, sift all the dry ingredients together (now days I prefer to pulse it all together in my food processor for a superfine texture).  This makes for a very light/fluffy biscuit, it’s worth the extra step.
• Cut the lard/butter mixture into the dry mixture until incorporated.  Do this step quickly as to not let the lard/butter start melting.  You want it to keep cold.
• Add up to 3/4 cup (no more) of buttermilk substitute, a 1/2 a cup is usually sufficient.  Mix together until you have a workable dough.  The dough will be a little more moist than a bread dough.  This is normal.
• Lightly flour(almond) your work area and place dough on top.  Lightly pat it out into a rectangular shape, about 1.5 inches high.
• Cut out 10 biscuits with a 2.5 inch biscuit/scone cutter, and place them on a cookie sheet/pan with parchment paper or silicone mat.  As you place them, reshape them as tall as you can make them without changing the width.  As they do fall slightly.
  Place the biscuits touching each other shoulder to shoulder, as this encourages them to rise upwards.
• Place on middle shelf of the oven for 10 minutes, turning tray at 6 mins, and then turn oven off at 10 mins, and let sit inside the oven for 2 minutes.

GRAVY INGREDIENTS:

• 1/2 pound of our homemade breakfast sausage
• 4 oz cream cheese
• 1 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 TBSP Butter – we use KERRYGOLD
• Black Pepper to taste – most breakfast gravies go heavy on the black pepper.

GRAVY INSTRUCTIONS:

• Brown the sausage meat in a large saucepan over medium/high heat.  If you’re sausage is not giving you enough grease(which is what’s needed to flavor the gravy), then we like to add 2 TBSP of bacon grease.
• Add in the cream cheese, and stir until fully incorporated.
• Add 2 TBSP of butter and stir
• Add 1 cup of heavy whipping cream(double cream in Australia/UK) with 1/2 cup of water, and stir until well incorporated.
• Add black pepper, the more the better. Take off of heat, let sit for 2 minutes to allow the sauce to thicken.  SERVE AND ENJOY.

Just a little advisory note: These biscuits are HIGHLY ADDICTIVE, and that can also be a bad thing, because like with ALL keto baked goods, they are designed to scratch an itch or fill a need for what we used to like to eat.  Having said that, almond flour and coconut flour are still higher in carbs if we eat more of them than we should.  We have designed this recipe to have 1 or 2 biscuits with gravy, to accompany some bacon or sausage and eggs, like you usually would with a non keto breakfast, not to eat 4 or 5 biscuits for a main course.  You also have to compare the old with the new and still see how remarkable this recipe is, for example:
FAST FOOD RESTAURANT: 2 BISCUITS AND GRAVY   84g NET CARBS
OUR KETO RECIPE:  2 BISCUITS AND GRAVY    8g NET CARBS
Because bacon and eggs are low in carbs, that still leaves you room to have a great breakfast.

BISCUITS: SERVES 10     NET CARBS: 3g Per Serving
GRAVY: SERVES 10         NET CARBS: 1g Per Serving (Approx 1/4 cup) 

AMAZON ASSOCIATES