Set aside 2 cups all-purpose flour in a large mixing bowl. Prepare 6 tablespoons cold butter, 3/4 cup milk, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt together. Then, using a pastry cutter (shown on left), a pair of knives, a spoon, or your hands, cut the butter into the flour. Basically, cut the butter and mix with flour to coat and separate the pieces. Continue until you get pea sized pieces of butter. It is important that the butter be cold for this process and not begin to melt. If it starts to get a little mushy, you can slip it into the refrigerator for 15 minutes to firm back up a bit before continuing.
Pour the milk in and mix gently with a spatula. We're not looking for a kneading action her, just a gently mix. (Kneading will produce gluten which will make the biscuit bread like instead of light and flaky.) Using your hands, form the dough into a ball once the milk has been evenly distributed through the dough. You might need to use a kneading action to get it into a managable shape and to remove some dough fromt eh sides of your container, but try not to knead too much.Transfer the dough to a piece of parchment paper or clean surface and roll out into a large sheet about 1/4 in. in thickness. Use a cup or biscuit cutter to cut rounds out of the dough. Do not twist the cup or cutter (unless you have already cut all the way through). Twisting will result in uneven or failed rising. Usually it's a good idea to press the top of the biscuit down a little or else you will get biscuits with rounded tops.
Now, biscuit placement is key to getting good rise out of the biscuits. Place the biscuit dough circles into two 9" cake rounds or onto a half sheet pan. Have the biscuits just touching. This should give enough air between the biscuits to allow even heating, but not so much space that the biscuits spread out when they rise. Bake in a 425°F oven until golden (about 15 minutes).
Basic Biscuits
| 2 cups flour | mix | cut into pea size | mix | roll out and cut | bake at 425°F until golden |
| 1 Tbs. baking powder | |||||
| 1/4 tsp. salt | |||||
| 6 Tbs. butter, cold | |||||
| 3/4 cup milk | |||||
Perhaps this is a good time to discuss baking pans with respect to biscuits. The use of a nonstick baking pan will result in your biscuit bottoms turning black while the tops are not yet golden. Aluminum foil and dark metal pans often have the same affect. Probably the best pan to use for biscuits is a gray aluminum pan.
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Or else to make them savoury put lots of cheese in the mixture.
to me a biscuit is a crunchy kind of cookie. that's why I love this site from the other end of the world we see how different recipies morph into different names morph into something delicious. thankyou Aussie
You simply have to take about any type of baking pan and sheet the bottom (underneath) with one or two layer of aluminum foil. It will reflect the heat and isolate substancially the bottom of your precious jewels. This works amazingly well... ( Mandatory note: For econergic purpose I suggest to always reuse the same aluminum, since aluminum is solid electricity and that electricity is scarce, well not here in Quebec, but.... (we even heat our dwellings with electricity, but thats another story))
THANKS A LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!
And to Fla: That's really REALLY unfortunate, my friend. Condolences for your arse.
You yanks call them cookies.
To make them crisp the practice was to lightly cook them (not brown) let them cool and the next day cook them again to brown them up. This practise produces by far the best biscuits (Cookies), once tried its hard to go back to the single cooking method.
You Yanks removed sugar from scones and call them biscuits, very curious indeed. I have cooked for Americans and have learnt to appreciate Southern soul food, It was a steep learning curve. but boiled intestines was the pits LOL
But you lot really know how to put on a BBQ.
Hot, fluffy, southern-style, buttermilk biscuits on the other hand...drizzled with honey and served with fried chicken, split, with butter, slathered with preserves, hiding underneath my sausage gravy...however you serve them, are a heavenly little poof of home. Yum!
The one discrepancy I keep finding among recipes (often referred to as 'receipts' in the old south) is how far apart the biscuits should be placed prior to baking. Just touching, a few inches apart, an inch apart...
...I guess I'll just have to keep on baking them until I get it right. Darn. ;)
It is... but unfortunately, the way I've coded the website, it lists recipes in alphabetic order by the title that I've gave the original article - which in this case is Traditional Chicken Pot Pit. I want to change how this works, but I'm not sure what the best method of listing recipe names is...
I'm curious as to why your friend would prefer margarine to butter for health reasons?
Emily
Everything Kitchens
is it the cold butter, the bisquit cutter? or what, (novice) does the butter milk make a difference in the raise :shock: :shock: i wanted large and high and used a hollow tuna can but for some reason not flakey enough
i want a fluffy, light,high, soft brown on top. busquit any suggestions. :unsure: [/b:a1c61ace81]cant get grandmas recipe right Wanda
It's suprising how quick and easy biscuits can be, especially if a food processor is used.
My only tip for this is that to create a sweet romantic gesture, cut the biscuit "dough" into heart shapes, and top when cooled with blood red icing (warm water, icing sugar, and a small drop of food colouring). So very easy but so very effective...
Scott Sinclair
http://www.realepicurean.com
Just a guess: If your pan is different - a darker pan than the one you used in the US - then the bottom will brown faster.
At weddings, funerals and other rites of passage, they appeared with paper- thin slices of Smithfield Ham in the middle. Beaten biscuits were an acceptable alternate with ham.
Biscuits were an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter in diameter. I never saw a 'big, fluffy biscuit' until I moved to Georgia.
The first and most important thing for light biscuits is to use "southern" flour. Even here in yankee Ohio, White Lily brand is available, but I hear King Arthur also makes a suitable version. The right kind of flour will be called "soft", "southern", or "winter wheat". It's a low-protein wheat that will lighten your baked goods...basically the opposite of bread flour. If you can't find soft flour at all, you can mix equal parts of all-purpose flour and cake flour.
Also, I use a 50-50 mix of butter and vegetable shortening for my biscuits. Butter gives great taste, but shortening makes the biscuits more tender. The mix is a good compromise.
Buttermilk gives better texture and flavor than regular milk. Period. Adding a tiny amount (like 1/4 teaspoon) of baking soda to counteract the acidity of the buttermilk is a good idea. I also use about 1 cup of buttermilk to 2 cups of flour. The dough is much stickier and harder to work with, but the secret to light biscuits is a wet dough. Make it as sticky as you can stand to work with. You know what the contents of a can of Pillsbury biscuit dough is like? Yeah, a sticky mess...but they end up nice and light because sticky is key! If your dough ball won't stick hopelessly to an unfloured surface, you don't have enough liquid.
Finally, I pat my dough out (on a floured surface, of course) to a greater thickness than this recipe calls for—generally about 3/4 inch. If you want them tall, they need to start tall. I can take the same dough that makes tall, fluffy poofs of buttery deliciousness at 3/4 inch, and find that it makes little dry hockey pucks rolled out to 1/4 inch. You're really trying to lower the surface-area to volume ratio so they don't crust too much.
And about placement. I've found that putting them on the baking sheet with about 1/4 inch gap between adjacent biscuits is perfect. That way they don't fuse into a big mass, but they still butt up against each other and help their fellow biscuits rise. Being adjacent to other biscuits is key in getting them to go UP instead of OUT. Therefore, I also like to arrange them so that there are as few "edge" biscuits as possible...you want as many of your biscuits as possible to be surrounded by others on all sides. One row of 12 biscuits would be horrible...you want the opposite. Consider it a packing problem.
Just my tips...take 'em or 'leave em.
-- Dave in Ohio
I cannot figure out why only my mom and grandmother seem to make biscuits like this.
does anyone have any suggestions how to make bisquits more elastic so
gravey or syrop can be sopped with out them crumbling before they can be lifted to your mouth?
working and kneeding a lot more and see how the turn out.
I am from the deep South too and dont know what coon gravey is but
it sounds interesting.
Thanks again for the reply.
you've made the wrong substitutions ;)
i'm 41 years old and learned how to make biscuits when i was very young. when my grandmother first allowed me to participate, i was so small i had to stand in a chair.
and one of the things i have learned is that biscuits are not health food, lol. you cannot expect to achieve a light & fluffy end result by using margarine or 2% milk. such a substitution would have the old southern ladies gasping with shock.
michael has a very good recipe here that shouldn't require a lot of revision. the only difference in his recipe and my gran's is that she almost always used buttermilk with a pinch of baking soda to cut it. and she never used a cutter. in my family we just flour our hands, pinch off a dough ball & softly roll it in hand before putting it in the pan. the final step before baking (and i don't do this) was to take a small spoon & dip some bacon fat to spread over the tops. this brings about the same effect as brushing with butter.
i'm flummoxed over why so many readers are argumentative about what should go in/on/with a biscuit. it's all a matter of taste & in my family, the tastes range from butter & syrup, to gravy, homemade preserves, or a breakfast meat sandwich. ultimately, who cares how you eat it? i've lived all over the world and i've never once baked biscuits for someone who didn't find a way to enjoy them!
*now - do any of you helpful readers have a good recipe for "cathead" biscuits? my other grandmother used to make this variation (another deep south biscuit). while still remaining light (not too heavily dense) in texture, they were a much larger & flatter biscuit - about the size of a cat's haed, hence the name. these biscuits had a stronger flavor of baking soda and were perfect with the tomato gravy she served with breakfast. sadly, she died when i was 12 so i never got the recipe.*
I'm Icelandic and here (english is not my native tounge) biscuits are like cookies (like in the UK) but not as sweet.
Here this would be refered to as a bun or roll, not a biscuit.
But it sounds nice and I'm going to try it tonight with my chicken :)
Try two cups self rising white lilly flour, 1/4 cup of vegatable shortening (these days you can use healthy stuff, or go for the gusto and try lard), 3/4 cups buttermilk. Follow the hints above and bake in a very hot oven (500) until nicely browned.
One last thing, about leftovers (doesn't happen often round our place) I didn't see a sugar biscuit though :) ...take last night's leftover biscuits, cut open and lay on butter to and sugar to the cut sides and broil until the butter has melted and sugar starts to brown
you've made the wrong substitutions ;)
i'm 41 years old and learned how to make biscuits when i was very young. when my grandmother first allowed me to participate, i was so small i had to stand in a chair.
and one of the things i have learned is that biscuits are not health food, lol. you cannot expect to achieve a light & fluffy end result by using margarine or 2% milk. such a substitution would have the old southern ladies gasping with shock.
michael has a very good recipe here that shouldn't require a lot of revision. the only difference in his recipe and my gran's is that she almost always used buttermilk with a pinch of baking soda to cut it. and she never used a cutter. in my family we just flour our hands, pinch off a dough ball & softly roll it in hand before putting it in the pan. the final step before baking (and i don't do this) was to take a small spoon & dip some bacon fat to spread over the tops. this brings about the same effect as brushing with butter.
i'm flummoxed over why so many readers are argumentative about what should go in/on/with a biscuit. it's all a matter of taste & in my family, the tastes range from butter & syrup, to gravy, homemade preserves, or a breakfast meat sandwich. ultimately, who cares how you eat it? i've lived all over the world and i've never once baked biscuits for someone who didn't find a way to enjoy them!
*now - do any of you helpful readers have a good recipe for "cathead" biscuits? my other grandmother used to make this variation (another deep south biscuit). while still remaining light (not too heavily dense) in texture, they were a much larger & flatter biscuit - about the size of a cat's haed, hence the name. these biscuits had a stronger flavor of baking soda and were perfect with the tomato gravy she served with breakfast. sadly, she died when i was 12 so i never got the recipe.*
Don't know about cat head biscuits...but I would greatly appreciate a good tomatoe gravy recipe?
Great question! Unfortunately, this was one of my earlier articles and I didn't diligently record the mass of the flour back then. I also know that I often don't bother to sift the flour when I scoop for biscuits - so that'll be around 160 g per cup. Call it at 320 g total.
http://www.mtnlaurel.com/Recipes/old_fashioned_cat_head_biscuits.htm
Use of a sharp knife, or a sharp edged can (NOT a dull or rounded edge, whatever you use) can make the difference between flat or high. A dull edge can seal the sides which doesnt allow for optimum loft. A sharp cut keeps the sides of the dough with open "cells" that can expand more.
Also, make sure that you use double acting baking powder, as baking powder begins working immediately upon exposure to liquid. Wait too long and when they go in to the oven, there's nothing to work on the rise. D.A. powder responds to heat.
/And use buttermilk...if you don't have buttermilk, use one tablespoon of lemon juice + 1 cup of milk and let sit for 5 minutes or so
Scones do have sugar, and so are somewhat sweet. They are also shorter than biscuits, which means they crumble easier. They typically, though not always, call for a lot more baking powder, so much more, in some cases, that you can taste it in the finished product.
The comment about cane sugar being called 'surguhm' is partly correct. I remember when I was a boy, we could buy cans of what my dad called 'sorghum molasses', or 'blackstrap' (this was in Texas in the 1950s). We'd typically get it from a roadside stand in cans that were, as I recall, essentially the same as quart-size paint cans. The syrup is not as dark as store-bought molasses, but way thicker. It looked much like very high-viscosity differential oil. It tasted very close to molasses, but not exactly.
I found out later that this was not made strictly from sorghum, but from cane or ribbon cane, with some sorghum syrup in it.
thanks so much for the recipe link! these are perfect and tasted so much like my gran's!
For kenw:
here is my other gran's recipe for tomato gravy (a staple in our bama kitchens with biscuits, over vegetables, and even potatoes):
2 tablespoons bacon drippings or veg. oil
2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
15 oz. can tomatoes
1/2 cup evaporated milk
Heat up big skillet (cast iron works best). Add the fat and heat on medium. Stir in the flour with a fork until smooth. Let the fat simmer for a minute to brown the flour just a little bit. Add the sugar, salt and pepper. Add the milk and stir until it bubbles and thickens. Add the tomatoes. Mash the tomatoes with fork to make them sort of chunky. The lumpy tomatoes give it the famous texture. Stir it all up and let it boil again. If you put up your own tomatoes, you can double or triple the recipe for each quart of tomatoes you use. This recipe makes about 2-1/2 cups of gravy.
p.s. I've just compiled a cookbook with tons of my grandmother's recipes along with some delicious comfort food favorites - write to me at shamarketingonline@gmail.com if you want info about the recipes/book!
Does anyone have a recipe for bisuits using cream rather than shortneing?
never tried, it - sounds fascinating!
http://www.bettycrocker.com/Recipes/Recipe.aspx?recipeId=8111&WT.mc_id=paid_search_phase2_08&WT.srch=1&esrc=336
http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,whipping_cream_biscuits,FF.html
http://www.carolewalter.com/sweet_cream_biscuit.htm
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/cream-biscuits-recipe/index.html
http://www.rachaelraymag.com/recipes/breakfast-recipes/sweet-cream-biscuits/article.html
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Whipped-Cream-Biscuits/Detail.aspx
I'm going to give these a try as well!
sez who? the measurements are quite well defined.
Americans also do not use stones for body mass <g>
if you need some help with the conversions, just holler.
11 Minute Biscuits
Heat oven to 450˚
2 C. self-rising flour
¼ C. mayonnaise
1 C. milk
1 t. sugar
Combine lightly, spoon into (12) greased muffin tins, bake 10 minutes, until lightly browned.
I am pretty sure these are even faster than using a tube of store-bought. They are tall, and a little crumbly, like cake.
These traditional biscuits sound great, but the absolute easiest biscuits I know of are those I make for breakfast with sausage gravy.
11 Minute Biscuits
Heat oven to 450˚
2 C. self-rising flour
1/4 C. mayonnaise
1 C. milk
1 t. sugar
Combine lightly, spoon into (12) greased muffin tins, bake 10 minutes, until lightly browned.
I am pretty sure these are even faster than using a tube of store-bought. They are tall, and a little crumbly, like cake.
Scones do NOT always have fruit in them as some of the US readers insist on saying! Traditional scones which are made in NZ, Australia & the UK are made without fruit, and they are normally served spread with butter.
If you add sugar instead of salt you can put jam and/or cream on top.
If you like savoury things you can put in salt and/ or cheese, onion and whatever else you like in them and have them as a savoury scone.
In terms of getting the layers maxed out, I wouldn't work the dough completely in the bowl. Just stir it in the bowl until the milk has been absorbed but the dough is still chunky. Dump it out on the counter (throw some flour down first). Press the lumps together, pat it out until it's about an inch thick. Fold it in half, press it out again, fold it in half again, etc. Only do this a few times. I'm not talking about actually kneading the dough here, which would mess up the final texture. But if you finish incorporating the dough via this folding process (rather than stirring in a bowl) your little chunks of butter will get squished out into thin butter layers, which is exactly what you want.
Someone above asked about spacing on the cookie sheet. Farther apart = darker, crispier, crunchier biscuits ; closer together = lighter, softer biscuits.
Finally I'd up the salt on the recipe above to 1/2 tsp.
Now you know.
On cook out nights we rolled cheesey biscuit dough into balls ~2cms across and dropped them into tomato soup that we boiled in the giant cans over a fire...made the best dumplings you should try it
As for what you want to call them I'm from Australia and I have traveled to a few states in the U.S and to some of the UK. Australia and the UK are very similar in their ideas and theories about scones, cookies, biscuits and rock cakes and I have to agree with what anon said earlier that what Americans call scones the rest of us call rock cakes. What you call biscuits we call scones. What we call biscuits/shortbread you call cookies/shortbread, and what we call cookies are usually only cookies that are round with a rough surface like oatmeal cookies or chocolate chip as far as I know.
In any case it doesn't really matter coz it's these very differences that makes travelling there exciting. If I wanted the same old biscuits I'd just stay home ;)
Scones generally have a slightly greater dry to liquid ratio than biscuits and most times include egg giving it a more course or heavier texture than a biscuit. If you eat/make scones and disagree, you have no idea how to make a scone and you've been eating/making biscuits all along. I don't care where you live.
either in an open pan - or some biscuit recipes specify a dutch oven.
use a bit oil, butter, take your pick. if the cast iron is properly seasoned it won't require much fat. preheat the cast iron
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes
I just dont know why so many of you have to get so bent out of shape about what we are calling what and if its 'right' or not. RELAX, there are much bigger issues in this world!
Having come from mixed parentage (father a yank, mother from the rural area around Glasgow), and being raised on a fairly large dairy farm, I grew up with a mixture of Old World and New World cuisine. Mum used to make the lightest scones I have ever had, but learned to make the humble biscuit of the colonies. Also, as both of my parents were from farm stock, Mum never liked to buy bread and the like, preferring to bake her own. After all, she had my sister and I to help her out while pater and my brothers were out in the fields.
I believe that a lot of the reason for scones being reduced to the humble "biscuit" of the colonies was that for many, especially in the early colonial days, sugar was not all that available and a lot of the settlers did not have easy access to many of the things that were so readily available in the port cities, both in New England and the Gulf states. This would include sugar syrup and a few other things.
Two things to suggest here. The first being, if one uses buttermilk, reduce the baking powder by about 1/2 teaspoon. The acidity of the buttermilk will cause the baking soda to begin to react even before it is subjected to the oven. This will also reduce the sodium level in the biscuits a bit. Important if one is hypertensive. The second is to have the oven well preheated and to keep all of the bi9scuits the same size going in, to insure even baking.
Regardless of terminology and preferences, biscuits are a really nice break from the normal toast that is all so common with breakfast. Also, if one is willing to try something different, the suggestion to make sausage gravy to serve over one's biscuits is a really nice change of pace and a great start to a day. Especially in cold weather or on days where a lot of heavy activity is planned. However one likes them, with butter, clotted cream and jam, honey, gravy or whatever, these light, fluffy little breads make a great addition to any meal.
because engineers use drawings, not pictures [g]
When I wrote this one up, I was actually making the biscuits for a topping to the Chicken Pot Pie article... so, no final biscuit photo. I'm working on a new biscuit recipe and will definitely have all the photos when I get ready to commit that to the Recipe File.
http://www.westernexplorers.us/Biscuits_Crackers_Hard_Tack_2010_SKWier.pdf
The use of so much milk and butter in this recipe may make a delicious bread item, but it is neither a true UK biscuit nor American biscuit.
3/4 cup milk for 2 cups flour is by far the most common proportion for American biscuits for the past century. See for example the Picayune Creole Cookbook of 1901, the Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896-1941), and Beard on Bread (1975).
scichinin
Yea, that's what all my recipe books call for. But in my arid climate, 3/4 c of liquid is not enough. I use 1 c milk/buttermilk for 2 c flour.