I have found that littlest question of cooking can cause my mind to start racing w/ possibilities, such was the case when the thought of "Fried Food" came up.
My mind immediately jumped to thoughts of the Fry Bread that we make at home and some of the unusual doughs we've used to make it on the fly. There is this great quick one that we've done where you take Grands Biscuits, flatten them out poke a small hole in the middle and quick deep fry them up, oh-my-buttery-simple-to-make-deliciousness! But, I wanted to put a BBQ spin on things. So, I decided that if I was doing something biscuits then some Fatty gravy would be in order. Of course, this would have been far too easy, I had to make it more complicated just because I love running on the knife edge of cooking disaster.
In a stroke of genius or insanity, I thought, wouldn't it be great to flip the whole thing inside out? And thus! The Gravy-Filled-Fatty Fried-Biscuit-Ball was born!
It started by making a gravy straight from bacon grease which I was unable to get a picture of due to my mad scientist like giggling and throwing about of ingredients, and stirring, lots and lots of stirring.
Afterwards, I immediately transferred the gravy to a container and placed it in the fridge to cool and "set up" I was shooting for a heavy custard like consistency. It took about 4 hours for the gravy to set up enough for the purposes intended. Then the cling wrap and breakfast sausage came out. I made up a mat of sausage that would allow for a large chamber inside the sausage. Next, I spooned out the gravy over a section of the sausage and rolled up the sausage very very carefully, (this part of the process could be greatly improved.) To keep the Fatty together and a tube like shape, I employed the use of a Frogmat. From there, onto the UDS it went (Yes, finally a picture!).
The fatty cooked just until the point where I had gravy starting to leak out, I wanted the sausage cooked but, not totally dried out. From, the UDS the Gravy-Filled-Fatty was wrapped in cling wrap and put in the fridge until the next morning so the gravy would solidify once again. The next morning though, it was GO TIME. I started off by making up a batch of Paula Deans biscuits but, added a tablespoon of black pepper and switched out vegetable shortening for butter. Once the dough was made, I brought all of the elements together, including a pot of pure bacon grease to fry everything up in. (Yes, I had actually saved up that much bacon grease for this to be possible
.)
The Fatty was cut into 1 inch sections, I would take biscuit dough in one hand and make a small bowl, place the fatty inside and then immediately place more dough on top to cover up the gravy center of the fatty, and from there worked the dough around from both sides until it joined and formed into a nice ball shape.
From there, off into the hot bacon grease they went to fry up!
There was one turn over required during the frying process to ensure that they achieved a nice golden brown color.
Due to the density of the dough, I was concerned that not all the dough had cooked and therefor not fully heated the inside so I threw them in an oven at 325 for 20 minutes to make sure they get nice and toasty on the inside. (mind you though, my oven is possessed and takes longer to cook things than it should.) I fried up a couple of eggs to go with it and voila!
OMG! These things are crispy and buttery on the outside with a nice black pepper taste the further in you go followed by an explosion of gooey gravy with salty sausage goodness.
In the end, these were quite a bit of work but, everything was from scratch and they tasted truly awesome.
