“It doesn’t taste quite right,” I complained to Will. “It’s missing something.”
I was making my first attempt at sausage gravy and biscuits, and it wasn’t going well. It was a craving.
My mom made sausage gravy a lot when I was a kid. As a single mom without a lot of money to go around, it was a cheap, filling meal on weekend mornings: sausage, flour, milk, and—more often than not—canned Pillsbury-style biscuits from the grocery store refrigerated section rather than the homemade version.
Like the pinto beans and cornbread I expected for Saturday lunches, sausage gravy was a childhood staple, but unlike the pinto beans, this one felt luxurious.
As an adult, I learned to make my own version, playing with spices and various sausage brands, adding or reducing milk and flour to change the viscosity of the gravy. It became a staple in my own home on weekends and sometimes as our “breakfast for dinner” weeknight meal.
And then Spain happened.
Breakfast is a different event in Spain—smaller, less dense, and it could be as little as a cup of espresso. In the Southern United States where I grew up, breakfast is often a marathon. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage patties or links, biscuits, pancakes, eggs over easy, poached eggs, eggs Benedict, corned beef hash, cinnamon rolls, bagels, oatmeal, yogurt, cereal, fruit … It’s a smorgasbord. One of my favorite memories as a kid is rolling up to the Shoney’s breakfast buffet and taking a little taste of nearly everything.
Not every breakfast looks like that, of course, but the point is an American breakfast—especially on a weekend—is often heavy and more than filling.
The first time I tried to recreate sausage biscuits and gravy here in Spain when I had a craving, it fell very short. The biscuits were flat, the sausage didn’t taste right, and the gravy was bland.
I gave up for a while, but the more I learned to cook with different ingredients in Spain, the more I wanted biscuits and gravy.
Eventually, I turned to AI—specifically, ChatGPT. I gave it my parameters: buttermilk-style biscuits, Jimmy Dean flavor, and a hint of spice that I seemed to be missing.
While not perfect, it gave me a pretty close replica to the flavor I was used to, although the biscuits left much to be desired. (They came from a mix I found at our local Taste of America store.) But the gravy? It did manage to satisfy some of that craving.
This experiment led me down a rabbit trail. What else could AI help me with in my kitchen?
