Tastefully Overcaramelized

BS is for Biscuit Snacks!

Ann Says

So I started making biscuits with my mom when I was a kid but we simply made them into triangles and called them scones. My friends tell me that these are not in fact scones and that what you get at Starbucks and other such places is in fact a scone. I do not agree. When I make an actual biscuity biscuit, I make it fluffier.

Abe claims that I make up baked goods without a recipe. This is sometimes true but like with most other people that seem to do this it is all variations on a theme, or vaguely what I remember from a recipe that I have but am too lazy to look up. I also am completely incapable of ever actually following a recipe so it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So these are my biscuits. They are originally from my mom’s “Whole Foods for the Whole Family” cookbook that was assembled by mothers in my preschool at Mother Goose. This was not the “Whole Foods” grocery store chain. It was a play on words, if you will. o_O

Biscuits

Yields maybe 8 to 12 biscuits, depending on the size of your cutter

Ingredients:
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt or 3/4 tsp sea salt
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 1 stick butter, very cold (like JUST out of the refrigerator)
- 1 cup buttermilk, possibly a little extra if you feel it is too dry

A note about buttermilk. It is not REAL anymore. Buttermilk used to be a delicious buttery thick beverage and now it is…very sour. But that is why it works so well. Also, with this new age fear of food going bad and bacteria growth and whatnot, I see my friends throwing out their buttermilk when it is in fact fine. Buttermilk lasts for FRICKIN ever.

ANYWAY. Set your oven to 425 degrees F. Mix your dry ingredients together. Then cut the cold butter into small chunks and drop them into the flour mixture. Use your fingers to smoosh the butter into the flour. There should be no pieces larger than a fava bean. They can be larger than a pea but smaller than a grape. Most pieces should be about the size of a pea, and some may be smaller. In any case, do not pulverize the butter into nothing. The cold moisture in the butter is what puffs these guys into flaky layers when they hit a hot oven.

Now that you have that, all you have left is to add the buttermilk, which should also be nice and cold so it doesn’t warm up the butter. Pour it in and mix it very gently together. When it is still not fully incorporated plop it all out onto a board and pat it together, also very gently. Pat it into a round shape about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. I use a glass that is about 2 and a half inches across to cut them out and plot them on a cookie sheet.

If you feel that the butter is getting too warm and melting into the flour already then stick the pan into the freezer for just a couple minutes to get everything nice and cold again. Stick ‘em in the oven and wait 12-16 minutes. You will have yourself some biscuits!

P.S. You can add another 1/4 cup buttermilk to this to get DROP biscuits and then drop them onto fruit for a delicious cobbler!

Hopefully this does some justice to my mom and the ladies at Mother Goose preschool.

Abe Says

If you, like me, spent half that post picturing peas, fava beans, and grapes exquisitely fashioned out of butter and perched atop pillowy mounds of flour, stop for a moment to note that Ann provides you a recipe even though she never, and this is as true as any Internet truth, actually follows a recipe exactly. The dimensions along which her biscuits vary from batch to batch are largely unknown to modern science but at least two we can tell here are “fluffierness” and “buttermilk”. I would venture an educated guess that another is something like “the dark arts”, of which ol’ Louis-Camille may or may not have been a practitioner.

PS, first post!