Drop Biscuits and Sausage Gravy + Video
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Drop Biscuits and Sausage Gravy is an easy one pan meal based on classic comfort food. Make this skillet recipe for breakfast or dinner!
Busy weeknights are the perfect time to break out your favorite skillet recipes. By making everything in the same pan, you won’t have a pile of dishes to clean after!
Drop Biscuits and Sausage Gravy
One of my family’s favorites is having breakfast for dinner, and nothing fits that better than this easy biscuits and gravy recipe!
It’s a one pan meal with rich sausage gravy and the fluffiest skillet biscuits ever!!!
This recipe is so easy to make, and there’s no rolling out or cutting biscuit dough beforehand. It’s the perfect family meal that you can enjoy at any time of day.
Another favorite skillet meal is this Pizza Pasta Skillet.
Everything gets dumped in at the same time to cook, and the result is a gooey, cheesy meal that’s sure to be a favorite.
How to Make Skillet Biscuits and Gravy
- Cook the sausage: Brown the sage breakfast sausage, then transfer to a bowl and set aside.
- Make the sawmill gravy: In the same pan, make a roux with butter and flour. Then, whisk in the milk and simmer until thickened.
Make sure to scrape the bits of sausage from the bottom of the pan too. - Add skillet biscuits: While the sausage is cooking, prepare the dough.
Once the gravy is done, add the sausage back to the pan and add drops of biscuit dough all over the top. - Bake and serve: Place the pan on a baking sheet and cook until the biscuits are lightly browned.
Serve drop biscuits and sausage gravy with a sprinkle of fresh parsley and enjoy!
Recipe Tips and Ingredient Swaps
- Sausage – I like the flavor of sage breakfast sausage, but any kind will work just fine.
- Substitute for roux: If you prefer, you can add the butter to the sausage and let it melt. Then, sprinkle the flour over the sausage and stir together.
Continue with the gravy and biscuits recipe from there. - The gravy will thicken! Since the gravy will thicken as the biscuits cook, make sure it’s a little looser to start. Add a splash of milk to thin it out as needed.
- Feel free to swap the cheese. This sausage gravy and biscuits recipe calls for Parmesan cheese, but feel free to use any type of cheese that you like!
Storing and Freezing Gravy and Biscuits
It’s doubtful that the drop biscuits will be good as leftovers because they’ll be soggy from sitting in the gravy.
You can, however, remove the biscuits and store any remaining sausage gravy in a sealed container.
It will keep in the refrigerator for 3-4 days or freeze for up to 2 months.
Sausage Gravy and Biscuits FAQ
You can find some form of gravy and biscuits as far back as the Revolutionary War. It was a simple meal that could be cooked over a stove or open fire.
Drop biscuits and sausage gravy as a dish seems to be traced to the Southern Appalachia area in the late 1800s.
The likely culprit is too much flour or not enough liquid. Remember, skillet biscuits will soak up some moisture when cooked in the gravy.
Once the dough comes together, it should look a bit shaggy and be somewhat sticky.
It’s a Southern-style gravy that’s rumored to have originated from the old logging camps and sawmills. Later, it was made famous by the Cracker Barrel restaurants.
Usually served with biscuits, it’s a simple mixture of meat drippings, flour, and milk or cream.
Originally, cornmeal was used instead of flour, which gave it a gritty texture. In fact, loggers used to accuse the cooks of putting sawdust in the sauce because of that!
Enjoy!
With love, from our simple kitchen to yours.
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Drop Biscuits and Sausage Gravy + Video
Ingredients
- 1 pound sage breakfast sausage, bulk
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 3 cups milk
- 2 teaspoons fresh ground black pepper
- Optional garnish: fresh parsley, chopped
Drop Biscuits
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 cup whole milk
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 450°F.
- In a large (10”) oven-safe skillet over medium-high heat, cook sausage until lightly browned. Use a slotted spoon remove sausage from skillet and place in a bowl.
- Meanwhile; prepare biscuit mixture. In a large bowl combine flour cheese, baking powder, sugar and salt. Mix with a fork until combined. Add milk and stir with a fork, until mixture comes together. Set aside.
- Add butter to hot skillet and whisk until melted. Sprinkle flour over butter and whisk together. Allow mixture to bubble for 2 minutes to cook out the flour-y taste, whisking occasionally.
- Add milk and whisk to combine, be sure to pick up the little sausage bits on the bottom of the skillet (they add a lot of flavor). Allow gravy to come to a bubble, about 3 minutes. Mixture will start to thicken as it cooks. Add sausage back to skillet/ Add black pepper and stir to combine. Remove from heat.
- Place skillet on a cookie sheet. Add biscuits to pan, use a ¼ cup scoop or a heaping tablespoon full. Drop biscuits all around pan.
- Bake for 10-12 minutes until biscuits are lightly browned, you may have to turn your pan half way through cook time if you oven does not cook evenly.
- Remove from oven, sprinkle with fresh parsley.
- Serve and enjoy!
Video
Nutrition
All nutritional information is based on third party calculations and is only an estimate. Each recipe’s nutritional value will vary depending on the ingredients used, measuring methods, and portion sizes.
Originally published November 2013, updated and republished March 2023
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Merry Christmas everyone. This has been Christmas Breakfast for the last several years and there is No Reason tradition. I make double the amount of Gravy and we usually eat the whole thing vy sundown. Thabk IMO you have lots on this site but this is hands down the Best.
My husband’s favorite breakfast is biscuits and gravy, this was such an easy recipe will be making it for him very often
This remains to be one of my top 10 recipes, we make this so regularly.
We use normal beef sausage, and when we barbeque, the sausage goes on as well, and no one may touch. Then the next day it gets cut up in pieces, and put in the skillet. The sauce is here is really a stock white sauce, with the difference in your recipe being the lovely scrapings of course. My stock white sauce takes about 10 minutes, it’s bland so I will add pepper. Lots of it. The 2 changes above we simply do because of time. And because we have a bit of a power issue in our country, we drop the temperature to 356. It really does the same, and runs a minute or 2 longer. This recipe is so versatile. We’ve even swapped the sauce with packaged sauce, so far we’ve tried cheese, blue-cheese, pepper, and mushroom. We have load shedding so often we have outages from 6 to 8 thirty so time is of an essence, any shortcut will do. Oh, and we made this again 2 nights ago, this time we made a small change to the biscuits. We usually use parmesan (those ones which are finely grated, usually put on your food by the waiter at Italian restaurants), but swapped it out with a whole block of blue cheese. Oh my… I think next time I may try this gem with pork bangers, and do some type of mustard and honey variation in the sauce and the biscuits. Thank you!
This is the best recipe ever! The biscuits were so easy to make and so delicious. The gravy was delicious as well.
Hi Janet,
We are happy to hear you enjoyed it! We make this frequently and there are never any leftovers 🙂 Have a great day!
TSRI Team Member,
Holli
This is my (now adult) son’s favorite meal! He requests it for holidays, special occasions, I even made it for him for prom! I can never get my act together to have the sage sausage on hand, so I use ground turkey, and while it’s cooking in the pan I dump in maple syrup, a ton of dry sage, salt and pepper. I also make it gluten free. It’s a really spectacularly delicious and comforting recipe!
Hi Keren!!
We’re so glad that you and your son love our recipe!!
TSRI Team Member,
Devlyn