C’mon, Don’t You Want One of These Right Now???
Well, folks, this recipe took some doing. It took me 3 times to get it right, and it was worth every minute I put into it. This all came about because my good friend, Jamie Parrish, called me one day and said he’d just eaten one of the best things he’d ever tasted. Do you have one of these kinds of friends? The kind that calls you whenever they’ve eaten something great, or when they’ve seen a recipe that piques their curiosity and they just want to talk it over with you? Yeah, this is my kind of friend.
This time he said his hairdresser’s mother brought in blueberry biscuits stuffed with a sausage patty while he was getting his hair cut. Can you even imagine? I don’t know about you, but these kinds of things do not happen at my hair salon. If only!! I couldn’t get those biscuits out of my mind and decided I wanted to come up with a recipe. I started by looking up blueberry biscuit recipes and all of the ones I found were very sweet and many were covered in icing. That wasn’t at all what I had in mind, so I began by using one of my standard biscuit recipes and folded in some blueberries. I baked them on a baking sheet and kept space between each one. Well, nope to this. They had no structure, were dry, and didn’t have the crispy bottoms I wanted. Back to the drawing board.
I changed out the amounts of butter, leavening, flour, and buttermilk, and worked the butter into the flour much more than I did with the first batch. I had a feeling that the addition of the blueberries, with their added moisture, called for the fat to be more evenly distributed, and I ended up being right. This time the biscuits were much closer to what I had in mind, except they didn’t have the crisp bottoms I was looking for.
Since these biscuits were going to be eaten, more or less, as a sausage sandwich, I really wanted the bottoms to be nice and browned and crisp. That’s when I decided to give them another try, but this time I baked them in a cast iron skillet.
Yep, this did the trick. Due to them being close to each other in the skillet, the biscuits supported each other as they rose in the oven, maintaining their structure, and the bottoms were nice and crisp. This wasn’t the place for a tall fluffy White Lily-type of biscuit. I needed it to be more substantive, but still biscuit-like and soft on the inside and that’s what I ended up with. Now that I had exactly what I wanted for the biscuit it was time to move on to the sauce.
I felt that a hint of sweet maple syrup would be good smeared on the cut biscuit, but I didn’t want it overwhelmingly sweet. I decided to make a maple syrup butter with a little miso added for balance. Well, this did not work. The biscuits have a lot of butter in them to begin with, and adding the maple butter made them too rich and butter drenched. Believe it or not, too much butter is not a good thing. For the next round I completely eliminated the butter and stirred white miso and Dijon mustard into the maple syrup, ending up with a superb creamy textured sauce to spoon onto the biscuits.
As to the sausage, I tried different kinds and it really all comes down to your favorite brand of breakfast sausage. Use whatever moves you. I used a pound and a half of loose sausage, divided it into 8 patties, sprinkled on some hot pepper flakes, flattened them out, and quickly fried them up in a large skillet. You just want them browned and crisp without overcooking them. So a few minutes on each side in a medium hot skillet is all it took in order for the sausage patties to cook perfectly.
Each one of these biscuits is a meal unto itself. I cut them on the large size – 3 inches in diameter and served them with slices of cantaloupe. You could cut them smaller if you wish. That’s totally up to you. I froze the leftovers and they heated up to taste as fresh as the day I made them.
What do I think of these overall? They’re fantastic. We’ve all probably eaten a sausage biscuit, but these are so much more. The berries are such a beautiful element, providing a tart/sweet component missing in regular sausage biscuits, while the miso maple sauce adds complexity and depth. I decided I wanted come crunchiness, so I brushed the tops of the biscuits with cream and sprinkled on a little turbinado sugar right before they went into the oven. This was the finishing touch that ended my quest.
Remember my friend, Jamie? Well, he called last week asking if I’d come up with my recipe because he really wanted to make them. I gave him this recipe and he got right on it. He called later, laughing, saying he followed all the directions perfectly, cut out the biscuits, and realized he had forgotten to add the blueberries. So, he patted the dough back together, gently folded in the berries, and recut the biscuits. They still turned out beautifully. Lol! I couldn’t be happier to hear it.
Thank you, Jamie (and your hairdresser’s mother) for the inspiration. I can’t wait to hear what she brings in the next time you’re there!
Blueberry Sausage Biscuits with Miso Maple Sauce
8
servingsButtermilk biscuits full of blueberries are sliced open and smeared with maple miso sauce. Then a spicy sausage patty is added and you've got the best sausage biscuit you've every imagined!
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Ingredients
390 g (3 cups) unbleached all purpose flour
1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder, aluminum free if possible
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 cup , plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
12 tablespoons salted butter, cut into 12 slices and chilled, plus 1 tablespoon for buttering the skillet
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and throughly dried
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons turbinado or demerara sugar
3 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon white miso
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 1/2 pounds bulk breakfast sausage
1 1/2 teaspoons hot pepper flakes, optional
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 475° with a rack in the center. Butter the bottom and sides of a 12 inch cast iron skillet with 1 tablespoon of butter. Set aside.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a small bowl, stir together the buttermilk and sugar, until the sugar is dissolved. Set it aside, but keep it chilled. Using a pastry cutter, cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it resembles bread crumbs, with only a few bits of butter left that are the size of small peas. You want the butter to be almost fully incorporated into the flour. If the butter seems to have gotten too soft, pop the bowl into the fridge for 10 minutes. Using a rubber spatula, stir the buttermilk mixture into the flour and butter. Be very careful to only stir in the liquid just until only a few dry flour streaks remain. You do not want to work this dough too heavily. Carefully fold in the blueberries, trying not to squish any of the berries.
- Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gently pat the dough into a rough oval, keeping the dough about 2 inches thick. You don’t want to pat it down too much at this point. Using a bench scraper or knife, cut the dough in half and stack one half on top of the other half. Pat it down very gently, sprinkling a little flour on top to prevent it from sticking to your hands, and repeat the process of cutting it in half, stacking, and patting, for a total of 5 times. If the dough starts sticking, add more flour to your surface. See my video for a full explanation of this easy process.
- Very gently roll the dough into an approximate 10” x 6 1/2” rectangle, flouring your rolling pin if it should stick to the dough. Using a 3 inch biscuit cutter, cut out 6 circles and place them in a 12 inch cast iron skillet. Very loosely pat the leftover scraps of dough together and cut out 2 more biscuits, placing them in the skillet. Brush the tops with cream and sprinkle on the turbinado sugar. Place in the oven and bake for 18 - 20 minutes. Remove them from the oven and let them rest in the skillet for 10 minutes, as they will continue to cook in the skillet.
- In the meantime, in a small bowl stir together the maple syrup, miso, and mustard. Set aside.
- Shape the sausage into 8 patties, sprinkling the optional hot pepper flakes on top of each patty. Using your hand, smash the patties fairly flat, about 3 Inches in diameter, dampening your hands with cold water to prevent them from sticking to the sausage. Heat a large skillet over medium high heat and add 1 tablespoon oil to the pan. Add 4 patties to the pan and fry, about 2 minutes on each side. Remove from the skillet to a paper towel lined plate and cook the remaining 4 patties.
- Slice the warm biscuits in half, spoon a little of the maple sauce on the bottoms of each biscuit, add a sausage patty, spooning on a little more sauce. Add the top half of the biscuits, serve and Enjoy!
2 Responses
These look amazing!
Thank you, Nikki!! They taste even better than they look. I promise!