Your sausage gravy deserves more from you.

Here's a secret recipe and the story of biscuits and gravy that aren't just your standard breakfast staple (includes two recipes)

I don’t recall how long I had to badger Fred Flury for his sausage gravy recipe, but it probably wasn’t as long as it actually took me to put a cast iron skillet on the stove and use his recipe.

Biscuits and gravy are on the menu at nearly every breakfast place. Most of the time, the biscuits come out of a package. It could be that the gravy mix does as well. It’s easy to make standard B&G and most of the time it’s tough to mess it up. Making memorable biscuits and gravy is a bigger challenge.

I worked in the Elkhart Truth newsroom with Fred from 1993 when I started as a cub reporter until 2008 when he retired as chief photographer. We often talked about food as we worked together.

Fred was a hunter and fisherman, a gardener and a cook. He touted his homemade sausage gravy. I’m pretty sure I told him that I couldn’t be sure how good it was until he shared some. He brought me a small container one day of dark, meaty gravy.

I badgered him to give me the recipe. I think either out of exasperation or as a parting gift before he retired, he started telling me one day and I grabbed a piece of paper to record his instructions.

There were few amounts, just ingredients and method.

I didn’t make the recipe for years. This sausage gravy needed good biscuits and I finally tried to make some Thanksgiving morning.

I had White Lily flour from a trip to North Carolina. This soft, silky flour has the leavening agent mixed in and is a go-to for many biscuit makers in the South. I used good butter and lard that my friend Lisa Miller had made from happy pigs. I used my fingers to work the fat into the flour, but did not work it too much. The cut biscuits nestled together on a half-sheet pan in the oven and got a dose of melted butter when they came out.

A few days later, Fred’s recipe came out and the sausage gravy was happening after all these years.

The mix of spice and the deep, dark flavor provided by the coffee was perfect. Using fish breading instead of flour adds flavor, as well as MSG depending on the brand you use.