It’s not just a language barrier, it’s also a cultural barrier. I can imagine someone being confused by this even if they speak fluent English, as the dish ‘biscuits and gravy’ contains neither biscuits nor gravy.
Um… literally every time I’ve had biscuits and gravy, it’s literally gravy poured over biscuits. Every time. Without fail. It’s kind of in the name.
the cultural difference is that the US is the only place in the world that calls “flaky scone-like buttery thing” biscuits
everywhere else in the world, biscuit means cookie or cracker
Instead of flaky biscuits, imagine cookies
And brown gravy.
Nuances They are so important
and instead of gravy, its beans
So a chocolate chip cookie
I’m fairly sure that’s where the game soggy biscuit originated from
Oh no…
Why does white/sausage gravy not count as gravy, in your view?
Why don’t apples count as pears? Why does black not count as white?
This is what biscuits look like
The stuff you refer to is a ragout, not a gravy.
Um, no. White gravies are a strong part of culinary traditions across Europe as a whole. The lumberjacks in Appalachia didn’t just decide one day to make biscuits and “ragu” out of nowhere, they had several sources of inspiration for why they made their gravy the way they did.
And, yes, according to basically every culinary school everywhere, ever - the referent sauce is a gravy, not a ragu/ragout as you attempt to imply here. The sauce is far, far too fucking fatty to be a ragu. It is literally made with meat drippings and is primarily composed of sausage fat and roux. The fact that milk is added as a binder/emulsifier + flavor-enhancer doesn’t suddenly turn it into a fucking “ragu”. Further, even if gravy was the wrong term for this sauce, the correct one certainly isn’t a ragu. This is much closer to a velouté and that family of sauces than it is to ragu and other meat sauces. Except, this isn’t velouté, either. Why? BECAUSE THE SAUCE IS MOSTLY MADE OF FAT SOURCED FROM DRIPPINGS, THE FUCKING DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF A GRAVY!!!
Have you never had southern American style biscuits and gravy before?
I just can’t seem to imagine how someone would think the gravy is a ragu instead of being a gravy unless you’ve literally never eaten it before and only have seen it visually and know that it is a sauce with meat in it… this whole position is patently fucking ridiculous if you’ve ever eaten it before, imo.
You can be Western European, pompous, or correct - pick two.
Sorry not to be a dick I just gotta raz you guys when I get the chance lmao, much love from across the seas. This is definitely an interesting hill you’ve picked to die upon in a thread topically about language barriers, tho, lol.
Just in case anyone wants to argue with you, here’s the tasting history guy backing you up:
Sorry but that is a ridiculous source, they forgot to add yeast to their yeast dough and just went with it. If they dont care about doing things the way they believe it tastes best, why bother with recipes at all?
Why are so many people so pompous about cooking? Making a mistake and running with it is how most recipes were invented in the first place. If you’re only ever cooking by numbers then you’ve got no ground to stand on to be critiquing cooking.
And on that note, this attitude is what puts me off of so many cooking shows.
There are many aspects to that question, I could for example say that what hundreds of people eat in a restaurant in a week has to be of consistent quality and perfectly hygienic. I could talk about how knowing when to add salt to a dish makes the difference between stale or juicy lentils. Or that a roux tastes so much better if you just sauté it for a few minutes, which anyone would always do if they just knew about it, and it’s the job of a recipe to tell them.
But in the end, I dont think cooks are more pompous about their craft than carpenters or painters are about their work. They wouldn’t use steel screws for wood or a broad brush for corners. It’s a craft and people get angry if someone gives wrong explanations.
I love a good “actually” moment, and you nailed it.
The fact that milk is added as a binder/emulsifier + flavor-enhancer doesn’t suddenly turn it into a fucking “ragu”. Further, even if gravy was the wrong term for this sauce, the correct one certainly isn’t a ragu. This is much closer to a velouté […]
I think it’s much closer to a béchamel. The recipes I’ve found dont really create a roux first, but if they did, a Bechamel is exactly what you’re creating if you add milk instead of water or broth and mix it until your wrist falls off.
The point is (and this hasn’t really been refuted) that both biscuits and gravy mean something quite different in different regions.
And what you associate with these terms differs depending on where you live and what you’ve eaten before.
Tbh, I’d have more of an issue with the biscuits than with the gravy. White gravy, ok, that exists. Gravy with meat in it, well, doesn’t strike me as a gravy but more of a meat sauce, but ok. But biscuits to me are hard and sweet and definitely not something that should come in contact with any kind of gravy.
Well, biscuits used to refer to essentially just hardtack so by “traditional” English standards both the modern English and American usage of the word is incorrect and unfounded. Traditional biscuits would have neither been soft and bread-y nor crumbly and sweet. They’d have been essentially rocks of flour. The Latin term that biscuit is descended from etymologically quite literally means “twice-baked.”
Of course, no one defines a biscuit that way anymore. We all know contextually what things refer to nowadays in a globalized society and using our big ol’ brains we figure out what one another means well enough.
Unless you’re literally anyone from the island of Britain (or were taught your English by them), apparently, because I see you lot online trying to chastise everyone else for their use of the language way more than anyone else in the Anglosphere. Frankly, at a certain point, you guys are the stick in the mud and need to catch up with everyone else in the entire rest of the globe. That doesn’t mean giving up your ‘u’ in color, exactly the opposite actually. It just means that a part of living in the modern world is accepting that you’ll need to speak to people from all around the globe and learn to be a big boy and discern meaning even when it isn’t immediately obvious to you.
Holy shit for people notoriously known for despising the French you think you guys would stop trying to do your best L’Académie française impression on the internet all the fucking time.
For someone propagating an open mind, you are surprisingly quick to jump to wrong conclusions and then going hard towards chastising the windmills you are fighting.
Maybe because these windmills won’t shut the fuck up already.
This is one of the dumber things to try and gate keep.
Words have meaning. Sometimes multiple meanings. Not just the meaning that you know.
I’m here for the hilarious sauce gatekeeping tbf.
That doesn’t look like biscuits or gravy to me.
Yeah, English is my only language and I was thinking wtf is biscuits and gravy? How does that go together in any way?
It’s actually freaking delicious and if you ever visit the USA you should definitely try it at some local family-owned restaurant where they make it from scratch.
Give your fascists the Mussolini treatment and I may consider visiting
Or just make it yourself. The biscuits are dirt simple, butter, flour, baking powder, and just enough water to hold it together. Gravy is just a white flour gravy with lots of pepper. Ingredients are sausage with grease, flour, milk, and pepper.
Season to taste.
Wonderful de-escalation lol.
Well it was pretty unnecessary when talking about food lol
I mean, yes, biscuits have simple ingredients but I would say getting them right is actually pretty difficult (I’m Southern and it took me ages and the help of my elders to get a good biscuit technique down).
There are some good YouTube videos on the subject though. I find the key is COLD hands and ice water!
Hell, even a white gravy with no sausage is still good if made right with a good fat as the base.
Good butter will start a sawmill gravy just fine. Bacon grease is pretty excellent as well. Add criminal amounts of black pepper. Best gravy for chicken fried steak.
UK biscuit is American cookie. American biscuit is more like UK scone. We’ll discuss muffins later.
I don’t need to imagine this.
I watched the Great British Bakeoff Mexican week.
Yea I’m a northern neighbor of the US, and while we do have common cultural elements, it’s my first time hearing of that meal.
Originally biscuits were just hardtack since they had to be rebaked in water to properly be eaten. Shortbread cookies and baking soda leavened bread both diverged from this common root and as such both qualify as biscuits equally.
The definition of it is actually what it is though. White gravy is still gravy. And Making it a brisket is hardly that different. I mean swap the bread with the meat ok, but hardly a stretch.
The correct way to react to most miscommunication. And awfully rare.
I wouldn’t think brisket would be good rare
It’s not. Brisket is definitely one of those dishes that is very unforgiving of cooking time. The only thing worse than raw brisket is burned brisket.
Likely language barrier thing here. I thought first that I had never once tried “brisket”, and I’m 40 y/o. I look up what it is, and it’s a cut of meat, rather than a recipe. So the person here then heard “make a dish out of brisket, with a sauce made with gravy”, or?
Brisket, as far as my personal experience with it has been, is a southern usa barbeque recipe. It’s a way of slow cooking beef, and not necessarily a specific shape.
You take your brisket sauce of choice, you soak a cut of beef, specifically from the cow’s breast or lower chest. In southern grocery stores it’s literally labeled ‘brisket’. You soak the meat in a cooking pot full of the sauce, and cook it in the oven for several hours. Afterwards, you can slice it, shred it, or whatever to your hearts content.
The slow cooking means that the meat flavor is thoroughly mixed with the sauce flavor. The specific cut of meat and slow cooking also means that, so long as you got the timing and temperature right, your brisket is incredibly soft to eat. Done right, it is also incredibly moist. Badly done brisket is incredibly dry. A lot of chain resturaunts will try to hide this with ass loads of BBQ sauce, but you can always tell.
I usually see brisket served with more barbeque sauce (usually a mix of ketchup, brown sugar and vinegar) but using a gravy instead would not be out of the realm of possibility.
In this case, brisket and gravy, although not common, would be a pretty great test of your cooking skill. Getting the brisket right, and then choosing a gravy that enhances, rather than hides or overwhelms the built-in brisket flavors would actually be a pretty great challenge.
***Edit To answer your actual question, the guy missheard “brisket” when the TV host actually said “biscuit”. Very easy to mess up, especially as non-native English speaker.
Brisket is the “chest” of beef - the underside between the front legs. It’s fatty and full of sinew which makes it great for slow cooking.
Brisket is a specific cut because that cut is well suited to slow cooking and not a lot else.
Brisket and gravy makes sense as a meal, but wtf is biscuits and gravy?
I’m British and there’s no end of meals that I would have gravy with, but biscuits isn’t one of them.
I can tell it’s a cultural/language thing because North Americans call biscuits cookies, but I don’t know what they mean by biscuits here.
Ah OK, so biscuit means savoury scones.
Every time I have this conversation with Americans they insist that it’s nothing like scones but then they describe something suspiciously sconelike
I think it has to do with the fact that every scone I’ve ever had is particularly dry and very dense. An American biscuit is denser than an average slice of bread, but still generally quite moist and spongy.
Maybe scones hit differently when they are very fresh? In the US we get scones almost exclusively at coffee shops or bakeries from the front window and I’ve never had one that was offered hot.
Edit: I would suggest a biscuit here is more like… Almost a croissant with thicker layers? Or like a stack of pancakes (made the European “crepe” sort of way, so pretty thin) but with thinner layers? Lol. It’s hard to exactly characterize.
Exactly!!
A perfect southern American biscuit is fluffy, layered, tender, buttery. Much more like a croissant than the scones we get here. They are just as good smeared with sweet jam, jellies, and honey as the are paired with mashed potatoes, gravy, and sausages. Usually best served hot, fresh out of the oven. They almost melt in your mouth in a good way. (My grandma made amazing southern biscuits: white flour, cold butter or shortening or lard, baking powder, salt, mix with fingers til crumbly, pour in enough buttermilk to just mix a soft dough. Roll out, cut into rounds, place on baking pan, brush with melted butter, goes into a hot oven. When tops are golden brown pull out and enjoy. They should be double to 3 times the height of rolled out dough. Work fast because overworked dough gets tough and loses some rise)
Scones here are usually cold, dry, dense, and crumbly. I’ve had sweet and savory scones. They seem like they are made to soak up some sort of liquid or be washed down with coffee or tea. I think we what we get given as scones are either stale or a prank.
That is also clarifying. Thank you.
It’s a buttery scone with the layered texture of a croissant that’s had a weight pressed down on it.
This is the best description
sconophobia is deeply ingrained in the american south
The scones available in the American South suck. They suck when I have made them myself. I’ve tried 3 different recipes. I can make some buttermilk biscuits though, and they are glorious. So either scones suck, like in general, or they don’t bake right in our climate.
No. Absolutely not. Unlike scones, biscuits have a nice texture.
A good scone is kinda crunchy outside with a nice soft inside. They change texture pretty quickly though.
I’m doing something wrong then. Mine come out more arid than desert sand.
I was raised by Southern women and you know what? This is accurate. The Southern style biscuit is basically an American scone. I’d never considered this before, but it is correct.
They’re delicious. A biscuit is a small, palm sized baked goods made with flour and fat. They’re fluffy, and you pull them in half, put some butter on them, and eat them.
Gravy is a speckled chicken gravy, a white gravy sometimes with sausage in it, and it goes well with the biscuits
No one in the US eats brisket with gravy. It would typically be a tomato based bbq sauce or nothing.
In addition to the biscuit recipe Tony replied with, the gravy in question is normally a white gravy made from “breakfast sausage” (ground pork with spices, particularly sage) and black pepper. The dish is salty, savory, and quite filling. Mostly served for breakfast with eggs and/or hashbrowns.
So gravy here means a sausage meat white sauce. Thanks for the clarification.
When Americans cannot fathom that the same word has different regional meanings.
“So fries here means sticks of fried potatoes?”
“No, fries means fries.”
Given their knowledge of the “one true English”, I wonder how they’d feel about my sharing a fag with a hooker at the park this past Saturday.
“Gravy” here means “gravy”. You may treat brown gravy as the default but the drippings+thickener+liquid idea is the same.
No no no, not to me here on this side of the pond! To me, this feels like a conversation like this:
“So rifle here means pistol.”
“Rifle means rifle. You may treat long rifles with a stock as the default, but the barrel + trigger + high velocity projectile idea is the same.”
I don’t think you should get to be particular, considering how you treat the word “pudding”.
I’m talking through this thing that sounded super weird to me (Who puts brown gravy on small hard cookies?! How on earth is that a dish on a cooking competition?! Why do they think that the guy putting the brown gravy on meat instead was the crazy one?!), and I’m understanding more, partly with your help (thank you), but every time I express something in British English that I understand you tell me I’m wrong, which is less fun.
It’s a different dialect dude, allow me my own usage and terminology.
“It’s crazy how Brits call anything in a bowl after main course a pudding! Cake? Pudding. Yoghurt? Pudding. Chocolate mousse? Pudding. If they have a spoon in their hand, they’re probably gonna call it pudding, pudding or not!” - better. Now we’re both having fun.
You want your feelings hurt look up Yorkshire Pudding.
There’s dialect and then there’s “no, that’s not what that word means.” I’m not telling you it’s wrong to call several different things pudding, I’m pointing out that it’s kinda weird not to just extend that acceptance to gravy when someone describes something from their culture.
So this breakfast “gravy” is made with drippings from a roast? What meat is roasted for biscuits and gravy?
The fat renders out of the sausage. It’s usually made in a single large pan.
Honestly I’d rather have brisket and gravy.
I want brisket on a biscuit with gravy.
I firmly disagree. A good Biscuits and Gravy is the perfect breakfast food. I am part of a Brunch Bunch and have had hundreds of different Biscuits and Gravy. It’s my go to dish for judging a restaurant.
There’s a breakfast place near me that has absolutely phenomenal gravy, but shitty store bought biscuits. I too, love biscuits and gravy, and I like their gravy but hate their biscuits, so what’s a man to do? Sourdough toast and gravy, my friend! I’ve actually come to prefer sourdough toast and gravy over biscuits and gravy most of the time, unless the place has amazing biscuits.
Third option: brisket and gravy on biscuits.
I’d be happy with either
How TF did he do a brisket in the same amount of time it would take to make biscuits, which are basically scones, which take 20 minutes?
And who eats gravy with brisket? Doesn’t sound bad though.
Is anyone going to mention it looks like a dick?
“I thought he said ‘6 inch and gravy’”
Can you imagine being the chef who went home in that round, though?
I might not agree with Alton Brown on all the opinions I’ve seen him post, but I have the impression that he’s someone who’s trying in general not to make things harder than they need to be (except of course when that’s exactly what the challenge is in the game that everyone signed up to play, what with all the wacky sabotage options on Cutthroat Kitchen).
Can you imagine being the chef who went home in that round, though?
You mean, if I lost to somebody who managed to make decent brisket in half an hour?
I mean, if he went home his biscuit and gravy weren’t amazing I guess.
I have never seen this show, but I have a hard time believing he managed to entirely cook the wrong thing and no one told him at any point. Unless it was done on purpose to make a good story…
You are totally on point. Here’s the source: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd6r9 (from 18:55).
They noticed right in the beginning and totally didn’t do anything to fix the misunderstanding until it was too late. And of course that happened for the purpose to make a good story.
Often on cooking shows like this, contestants will do something creative and different in order to stand out, so it makes sense that they’d wait and see what he’s cooking up.
Honestly I think they took the best possible approach, they let the creative create, and when it was revealed that there was in fact a communication breakdown, they handled it fairly and made sure to not penalize the contestant for the host’s failure to effectively communicate. This is especially important with such an exceptionally regional dish with many different ways to prepare it. People who haven’t spent time in the region that its regularly served in may entirely misunderstand how its supposed to be prepared and served, and that causes there to be incredible variation between recipes and approaches
The main point of any TV show is to entertain. They aren’t there to be a fair sports competition to find earth’s greatest cook. Especially not for such a low-brow entertainment-first cooking show as cutthroat kitchen.
That part of the episode was decent drama. The mix-up clearly made the scene more interesting. If this was an actually serious cooking show it would not have gone like that. But it’s an entertainment show and that’s ok as well.
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Idk when it got so common for people to basically say “I have no idea what I’m talking about and have zero experience in this matter but this feels like bullshit” but pretty sure it’s actively destroying the planet.
Yeah, it’s quite common to claim that someone else has zero experience on the matter and accusing them of actively destroying the planet, without actually having a point.
Here’s the source: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd6r9 (from 18:55 on).
So yes, everyone else noticed it right from the beginning and they neither told him about his misunderstanding nor did they let him just redo the 60 second “shopping” part where they collect the ingredients they need.
So stop being fake-outraged and look at the source.
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I didn’t feel like this requires expertise. It’s a cooking show, contestants are surrounded by other people who can plainly observe what they are doing. The complete lack of biscuit preparation while getting out the meat would have been very obvious.
All these reality shows love to foster misunderstandings and exacerbate through editing. Frankly they’d be even more boring otherwise.
If I was Alton, I’d have laughed my ass off
No way in fuck is anyone cooking a brisket in under 6 hours without it being inedibly chewy.
Do you have a moment to discuss our lord and savior the pressure cooker?
A sous vide would get you there minus some of the smoke and all the crust . Far from ideal but certainly not impossible.
Sous vide is many things, but fast is not one of them.
under 6 hours
Sous vide would definitely cook it faster while retaining moisture. 100% do-able in 6 hours.
Okay but cutthroat kitchen requires the contestants to finish the dish in 30 minutes.
under 6 hours
A small flat could be done hot and fast on a smoker in 5 hours and you’ll get crust and some delicious smoke. However, you won’t get as much smoke as you would low and slow.
What an AI level response. Inaccurate but provided as fact. Username checks out!
Naw, your just shit in the kitchen I guess 🤣
Can’t even use the correct “you’re”. What a shit AI 🤣
Gotta love when folks resort to typos. Especially in this moment where you in your mind are engaging with bad spelling bot.
It’s possible, but it comes out more like a pot roast in my opinion. The fastest brisket I’ve ever completed to satisfaction was 2 hours for I think an 8-10lb brisket at like 300 in a green egg. It wasn’t planned, the fire just got away from me but it came out like 87% as good as a true low and low brisket.
I imagine he cooked only a small part of it in a pressure cooker it might work.
Pressure cookers (and their scary cousin the pressure fryer) are kitchen witchcraft.
Oh wow. That channel is excellent.
I shouldn’t watch this stuff while I’m hungry
Fuck. I know right? I’m starving
He made a brisket in the time it takes to make biscuits and gravy? I don’t think so.
A pressure cooker can work wonders.
Even then, it would take that long to prep and heat up to pressure.
Brisket and gravy looks yum. Don’t see the problem here.
Our society is so wasteful and entitled if we’re getting pissy at this level.
