Ollie Vaughn's

I'm Dominic Armato and this is the Killer Dish. Where breakfast dishes are concerned, biscuits and gravy are about as h But at Alivons in Phoenix, Lindsay McGee takes a casual staple of home cooking and does it with exceptional care. McGee grew up with biscuits and gravy and the crew at Alivons It starts with a light dough made from AP flour, butter, baking powder and a touch of brown sugar, folded with icy cold buttermilk until it's just barely combined. They work the dough very gently, folding it over itself and lightly rolling it out four or five times to give it a layered texture. The dough is rolled to roughly the thickness of your th After a quick wash of egg yolks and water, the biscuits head to the oven for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, a custom extra fatty blend of Shriners Country Pork Sausage slowly renders until much of the fat has cooked out. The crew gives it a quick shot of high heat to lend a little color, tosses in a little salt, then adds flour to soak up the fat and create a light roux. Then comes whole milk, which cooks until it reduces into a thick gravy that'seasoned with a whole lot of black pepper and a little dash of Tabasco. When the golden steaming biscuits emerge from the oven, half a biscuit goes into the bottom of a bowl. It'smothered with a couple big ladles of the rich gravy, topped with a fried egg if you Biscuits and gravy is so frequently a neglected afterthought that a version made with quality ingredients and a little care is almost shocking. The biscuits are light and fluffy, the layering and bits of cold butter lending them a delicate texture. McGee's gravy, meanwhile, is a case study in why some recipes shouldn't be slimmed down. It's a meaty mix, heavy with pork and the scent of sage, but it plays a lot lighter than it looks, fresh and creamy, smoothly textured but full of flavor. Add the rich lick of a barely set egg yolk, and you've got a killer reminder of just how good simple homey breakfast fare can be. My family's from Oklahoma, so Sunday mornings mean biscuits and gravy. Christmas morning means biscuits and gravy. The scratch buttermilk biscuits, that's a huge secret. It's a lot different than canned biscuits or even a novice making a buttermilk biscuit. We've really perfected the biscuit here. It's light and fluffy, lots of layers, lots of butter. The sausage is a really good quality sausage too. What do you get that from? Yeah, so we get our sausage from Shriners. They make a special blend for us that has a little extra fat in it so that we can render more gravy. We found it to be the perfect flavor but a little too lean for making gravy, because you do need the fat to render the gravy. It's carefully assembled. It's the smallest little thing, but you get the half of biscuit on the bottom that it all just kind of soaks in, it gets all melty, and then you've got that nice one on top with the beautiful crust, and you get the full texture of it. It's made with quality, it's made with clear, and it makes it a lot better for dish.