My Granny’s Been Making This 5-Ingredient Southern Specialty Every Weekend for Decades

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, I find myself looking back at my favorite childhood traditions in search of some I want to recreate with my own young daughters. There was one weekend routine that immediately jumped out. 

As a born-and-raised Southerner, I’m no stranger to biscuits and gravy, but the way my grandma (or Granny, as I call her) makes them looks and tastes pretty different than what you’re probably accustomed to—that is, unless you grew up in the South like me. But she’s been making biscuits with chocolate gravy—yes, chocolate—every weekend for as long as I can remember, and now we make them for my daughters, too.

For the uninitiated, chocolate gravy has nothing to do with meat or pan drippings. Really, it’s just a cute name for a simple chocolate sauce that’s typically served with flaky biscuits for breakfast or brunch. In my family, we typically serve it with freshly baked biscuits alongside scrambled eggs and bacon or sausage, or both.

I grew up eating it almost every Saturday morning after a Friday night sleepover at my granny’s house. It’s one of my fondest memories from childhood, and now that my family has moved back to the same town that my granny lives in, she gets to make it for the lot of us.

The first time they tried it they were in disbelief—chocolate for breakfast, could it be true?! Nowadays, going over to her house has become as much a tradition for them as it was for me, and it’s one I hope we continue to pass down.

How to Make My Granny’s Chocolate Gravy

This should come as no surprise, but, like many moms and grandmas, my granny always measures with her heart. So when it came time for me to try to recreate her recipe on my own, her instructions were, let’s say, less than precise.

Luckily, we have a version on Allrecipes that is almost exactly the same as hers, and it’s one I now follow for measurements. The only difference between this and my granny’s recipe is that she excludes the vanilla. A few other tips from Granny: 

• Always whisk the dry ingredients before adding them to the wet. 
• This recipe adds the wet (milk) ingredients to the dry (cocoa powder, sugar, and flour), but my granny typically starts with the wet ingredients in the pan and slowly adds the dried. Since she measures with her heart, this ensures she can get the perfect consistency, adding a little bit of the dry ingredients at a time until it reaches her desired thickness.
• It isn't specified in this recipe, but my granny always uses the Hershey’s cocoa powder that comes in the brown tub. It’s what she grew up using, and it’s what I always use now as well.

I’m not the only one for whom this recipe strikes a nostalgic chord. Scrolling through the recipe reviews, you’ll find a family tree’s worth of people who grew up eating this treat and now make it for their kids or grandkids. One Allrecipes community member writes, “I was raised on chocolate gravy and biscuits…made it for my son and husband and they loved it.”

Another found this recipe in a similar situation to me; “This is exactly [the] same recipe handed down through generations of my mother's Southern family. We've never had it written down, so there's always too much inconsistency and variation. Thanks for putting measurements to this!”

Whether you grew up on biscuits and chocolate gravy or this is the first you've heard about them, this recipe is a great place to start. Because any grandma-approved recipe is an instant winner, right?