Country Fried Steak

Ever since I pushed the button to post yesterday's entry, I've been thinking about fried steak with brown pan gravy - also known as Country Fried Steak.  Even dreamed about it last night.  I've got to have some.  Soon.  Since I'll be cooking it, I'll share the recipe.

Country Fried Steak

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1 recipe Basic Fried Steak.
1 large Spanish or yellow onion.
2 T. vegetable oil
All-purpose flour
2 C. tap-water
Slice the onion into 1/4-inch disks.
Salt.
Pepper.

Make the Basic Fried Steak recipe, removing the "crunchies" but leaving as much oil as possible in the skillet.
You'll cook your onions in the same skillet

Cook the onion slices on a LOW fire, turning frequently, until they're translucent.  If the onions are ornery and want to stay disks, break them apart.  You want onion rings, not onion disks.

Remove the translucent onion rings, drain them, and set them aside.

Now for the brown pan gravy:

After you remove the onion from the skillet, pour in the vegetable oil.

Into the oil, mix (a wire egg whisk is my tool of choice for this) enough flour to make a paste the consistency of room-temperature peanut butter.  More flour makes for a heavier-bodied gravy; less for a lighter-bodied gravy.

With the skillet over the same LOW fire that cooked the onions, and stirring constantly to keep you pan gravy from burning, cook the oil/flour mixture gently until it's the color of peanut butter.  Reduce heat (or take skillet off the fire entirely).  After the pan has cooled somewhat, pour in the tap-water, all at once.  This cools the pan and stops the oil/flour mixture from further cooking.

Put the pan once again over a LOW fire, and while stirring constantly, cook the pan gravy until it thickens.

Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Arrange the steaks on a serving piece, and pile onion rings on top.  Pour the brown gravy over the steaks and onion rings, and serve.

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Notes:

1)  In my opinion, the onions alone give all the additional flavor I want most times, but I sometime like to vary the seasoning a bit by substituting seasoned salt, onion salt, garlic salt, etc., for the table salt.  I encourage you to experiment.
2) If you fry the steak in bacon grease, rather than vegetable oil, you still may (should?) use vegetable oil to make the pan gravy.  If you decide to go authentic all the way, however, be sure to measure 2 tablespoons of the bacon grease you use to make the gravy when it is in liquid (melted) form.  For what it's worth, I prefer to make my gravy with vegetable oil, canola oil in particular, regardless of what the steaks were fried in.

I hope you're successful at making this, and that you and yours enjoy it.

Incidentally, for the fat/flour mixture for the gravy, the "classically correct" proportions are given by weight: one unit-weight of fat to one unit-weight of flour.  If you own a digital kitchen scale with tare compensation (you can set a container, called a 'tare' in weighing circles, on the pan of the scale and press a certain button to 'zero the display') you can just weigh the oil and flour.  To do this, it's advisable to let the oil determine the amount of oil/flour mixture:  first, place a bowl, etc., on the scale pan and zero the  display.  Then measure out 2 tablespoons of oil into the container and weigh it.  Record the weight of the oil.  Next, place another container on the scale pan and zero the display again.  Now add flour to the container until the display reads the same as the weight recorded for oil.  Now, you could use flour as the weight basis, but if you do, you could end up with too much gravy (not always a bad thing), or too little (an utter tragedy, in my opinion).

So long for now.  Happy cooking!