Mushrooms and spices used in sausage making give this vegetarian version of a Southern diner breakfast staple a convincingly meaty flavor.
BISCUITS AND GRAVY ARE PERHAPS THE ICONIC SOUTHERN BREAKFAST FOOD. More specifically, biscuits and some kind of meaty gravy made with either pork sausage or rendered fat from fried ham or even lard, if no meat is available. Sounds dodgy, tastes delicious.
The vegetarian gravy here gets its meaty umami goodness from mushrooms. Herbs and spices used in sausage making—fennel seed, thyme, salt and lots of black pepper—make it convincingly sausage flavored, and crushed red pepper gives it that touch of heat the best biscuits and gravy always seem to have. Speaking of biscuits, we recommend (and the recipe calls for) drop biscuits. Much easier to make and wonderfully tasty.
Marion and I have a term for when dishes turn out exceptionally well. If something is good enough that we’d be happy if it had been served to us in a restaurant and we were paying for it, we call it restaurant good. This dish was in a subset of that—diner good.
It was also startlingly meaty. I had cooked this dish. I knew what was (and more important, wasn’t) in it. But I still was convinced that I was biting into bits of sausage as I ate it. You’ll find the recipe here.