![]() I’m back in the south now, and have once again, found what recipe works best and what needs to be done to create layers of flaky, delicious biscuits. Do an inventory check to make sure your baking supplies are up to speed, then get in your kitchen and enjoy baking. If your flours and baking powders or baking sodas have been sitting around for a while, you won’t get the best results. My biggest tip for any kind of baking, is to always you the best quality and freshest ingredients you can get your hands on. When I lived in England and then Ireland, I missed my southern biscuits so much! That started my search for a biscuit recipe that I could adapt and enjoy as a bit of home loving comfort food. I think it has something to do with how our ingredients are processed today. ![]() I have my mom’s recipe that she would use, but they just never turned out like I remember. So over the years, I have tried many and I do mean many, recipes for them both. Growing up, I would typically find one or both of the offerings at a southern table, biscuits and cornbread. I also added a bit of baking soda, not for lift but for its slightly mineral-y tang.Southern Biscuits are the quintessential bread of the south! Having already flouted the most sacred law of biscuit making by introducing a warm ingredient, I took a firm stand on the side of sugar and added a little to the dry ingredients. These biscuits held their shape beautifully were fluffy, not flat and were pleasantly rich without being greasy. The dough came together easily, neither too dry nor too wet, and with no riotous inflation. I cautiously heated the cream only to body temperature and then stirred it into the dry ingredients. Maybe all I had to do was make sure the cream was above 95 but below 140. But they didn't spread either, and they weren't objectionably fatty.Ī bit of research revealed that the fat in cream liquefies at between 90 and 95 degrees and the acids in baking powder are activated at about 140 degrees. By the time the dough mounds went into the oven, the baking powder was spent, so the biscuits didn't rise. I heated 2 cups of cream to 160 degrees, and as I stirred it into the dry ingredients, its heat and moisture activated the baking powder, causing the dough to expand so boisterously that it defied my frantic attempts to shovel it into the ⅓-cup measuring cup. ![]() My first attempt failed pretty spectacularly. ![]() If so, that could potentially fix both the spreading and the greasiness. The fat particles in cream are so minute that we don't perceive them as solid, and they were stowing away in the cream only to melt in the heat of the oven, making the biscuits greasy and, in combination with the water in the cream, causing them to spread.Ī new thunderbolt struck: What if I melted the fat by warming the cream before I mixed it into the dough? That sound you just heard was the collective gasp of generations of horrified Southern bakers, but hear me out: Maybe heating the cream would increase its fluidity enough to enable me to make a scoopable dough with less of it. Cream isn't a single ingredient, it's two: water (with a little protein and sugar mixed in) and solid fat. ![]() This formula makes a pretty stiff dough, so you'll still have to roll and cut. Thanks to the cream's generous butterfat content, the biscuits will be plenty rich and tender. Want to skip cutting in the butter? Make cream biscuits: Replace both the butter and the milk with heavy cream. It's not difficult, but there are rules that must be followed, and all that mashing of the butter and rolling and cutting can get messy. Finally, you transfer the mass of dough to the counter, gently roll or pat it out, and cut out rounds with a sharp biscuit cutter before transferring them to the oven and baking them for about 15 minutes. Next, you stir in cold milk or buttermilk-masters of the art emphasize that everything must remain frigid-until the mixture forms a shaggy dough. First, you combine flour with salt, baking powder, and maybe a bit of sugar (a highly contentious addition-more about that later) and then toss in cubes of cold butter, which you crumble and flatten until precisely the right amount of tiny butter flakes are strewn evenly throughout the flour. ![]()
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