I’ve always liked to cook, but I’ve never really delved into baking. It always seemed so fussy. However, as they say, the first step in being kinda good at something is being really bad at it, so I decided I should try anyway. All said, pretty pleased with the result, especially the evidence of laminated layers.
Think savoury scone and you’re most of the way there.
To add to this, there are drop biscuits and flaky biscuits (the southern kind, seen above). Drop biscuits can be like a much softer, more savory scone, but flaky biscuits are much lighter and layered, almost like a savory pastry often served with sausage gravy or red eye gravy.
since you brought red-eye gravy up, are your familiar with its preparation? I’ve read that it’s often made by frying up a ham steak with maybe a little supplementary fat (butter, lard, or bacon grease) and creating a roux from the drippings. rather than milk, as might be done with sawmill/country gravy, the liquid added is strong black coffee.
this combination of ham, coffee, and roux has long fascinated me, as I imagine a real roller coaster of flavors there. however, I’ve not had the opportunity to order it in a real Southern diner, so I don’t know if I’m off-base here, especially because, as I think about it, I’m pretty sure the first time I came across the dish as a concept was in an alternate-history novel in which racist South Africans time travel to the American Civil War and hand out AK-47s to the Army of Northern Virginia. In other words, citation very much needed lol.
Honestly, I’m probably not the best person to ask. I grew up in an area that was fairly rural, but very far north, so people used the term “red eye gravy” very loosely to refer to biscuit gravy made with strong black coffee. Ham may or may not have been involved, and often it was made with a roux made of bacon fat. Generally the biscuits where I grew up were drop biscuits. I’ve been vegan for more than a decade now so it’s been a loooooooong time since I made it myself and I usually just used left over bacon grease, although my understanding is that authentic red eye gravy is generally made with country ham drippings, that’s correct.