Tennessee · Breakfast
Country Ham with Redeye Gravy
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners.
Ingredients
- 4 slices dry-cured country ham, ¼-inch thick (Tennessee's salt-cured, aged pride, Benton's if you can get it)
- 1 tbsp butter or just the ham's own fat
- 150ml strong black coffee: yes, coffee; that is the gravy
- 1 tsp brown sugar, optional heresy that many kitchens quietly commit
- Biscuits and grits: see the American shelf for the biscuits; you will need them
Equipment
Skillet
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesRendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
The words inside
Aged GoudaAmerican Country HamVermouth & the Fortified Aperitif Shelf
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Fry the ham slices in a hot cast-iron skillet, 2–3 min a side, until the edges brown and the fat renders; remove. 3 min
- Pour the black coffee straight into the screaming pan: stand back; the deglaze is the show.
- Scrape every browned bit loose; reduce 2 min; the brown fat pools in the center like a red eye. 2 min
- Return the ham or plate it; spoon the thin, salty-bitter gravy over ham, biscuits, and grits without prejudice.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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