A Taste Of East Tennessee for our Wine Club - Part 2

In my last post, I discussed the September meeting of our wine club with the theme of “Food and Wine from East Tennessee” where each couple brought a bottle of wine from our area for the tasting and a small plate dish from this area or the southern mountains. 

Our selections were wild boar sausage gravy with buttermilk biscuits and a peach wine from Chestnut Hill Winery in Crossville. 

They make three dry, two semi-sweet grape wines and six sweet fruity wines.  This is the description for ours.  “Volunteer Peach: Made from a blend of several different wines with the natural peach flavoring added.  Enjoy the fresh peach aroma before you refresh your palate with this with wine.  Enjoyed as a social drink or after dinner.  Try pouring some over vanilla ice cream and you will find the taste will be amazing.”

While Bev is a regular bread maker, we generally use Pillsbury frozen biscuits, so she doesn’t have a lot of experience or a go-to recipe.  But since we wanted smaller than normal size biscuits and a homemade version, we both set off in search of recipes with the first three, including angel biscuits, all judged to be just okay.  

One recipe that we both thought looked good was from Angela Roberts over at her Spinach Tiger blog titled My Best Homemade Fluffy Southern Biscuits for My Southern Husband.  Rather than copy the recipe here, I’ll just refer you to her site for the recipe and some delicious looking shots, but mention the changes Bev made:  She used a little more buttermilk to get the dough to come together and she patted out the dough to a thinner ¾“.

We served them home style - stacked high on a plate.

The search is over and we now have a go-to recipe for scratch biscuits and they met all of my criteria – good flavor, light and flakey, split a little when baked.  Since they are far from diet food and we usually have them with something even more fattening, we rarely eat biscuits so it was great having them four mornings in a row as Bev tried different recipes and we have a bunch in the freezer as well.

For the sausage gravy, I used my normal cooking method:

1. Fry and break apart two pounds of sausage.

2, Move the meat to one side and tilt the pan to the other for a couple of minutes to estimate the amount of fat.

3. Re mix the meat and fat, sprinkle 1 Tbsp. of AP flour per Tbsp. of fat plus one more over the meat and cook for a few minutes, stirring often.  I never used to measure anything for this until I learned about the fat/flour/liquid ratio.  For this I used 6 Tbsp. of flour and 6 cups of whole milk.

Slowly and constantly stir in room temperature milk (about a cup per Tbsp, of flour used) to get the desired consistency.  I added about a cup for each of the first four times then the final two cups.  I had a little fat floating on top and sprinkled a little flour on top, whisk just that area and it took care of it.  This is after the second, fourth, and last milk additions.

One small confession – I didn’t really use wild boar but I did use Swaggerty’s sausage from nearby Sevierville, which is one of several sausage makers in the area and our favorite.

The normal gravy around here in restaurants is a white pasty concoction with a little bit of sausage flavor and meat, but mine is how Dad taught me to make it – I could have probably made a few gallons of the local version with this amount of sausage.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

9/29 & 10/2/14 dates