I’ve always liked to cook, but I’ve never really delved into baking. It always seemed so fussy. However, as they say, the first step in being kinda good at something is being really bad at it, so I decided I should try anyway. All said, pretty pleased with the result, especially the evidence of laminated layers.
*confused British noises*
I spend a lot of time making biscuits. When that recipe gets old try making different versions. Try drop biscuits, use yogurt, add mix-ins. Make a fluffy southern biscuit. Pretend you’re on a cooking show and the challenge is time: make them without measuring. Eat a lot of biscuits!
They look good.
The good thing about baking is that it get easier. The cleanup doesn’t but everything else does.
Indeed! I felt like a mad man when I was dusting my counter down with flour, but thankfully I was able to do so right next to my sink, so cleanup was just pushing the leftover cruft into the sink and giving a quick wipe down. Still, definitely not a breakfast fit for a workday, that’s for sure.
Oh, those look soooo good… I can already imagine and taste the fluffy goodness lathered in butter 🤤 Well done!! And you’re right - everyone has to start somewhere.
Next, you could add a little bit of garlic, onion, and bacon for a more savoury treat.
100%
I definitely have some ideas for some variations with cheese and herbs that I think will go great with some sort of chicken dish.
Oh yeah, cheese!! I’ve done cheese scones, and I recommend a sharper cheese so the flavour comes through after baking.
May I ask what these buiscits actually are? The word means something different to me. These look more like some sort of white bread rolls, but then again not really…
In the US, “biscuit” refers to a type of small, crumbly bread, usually eaten for breakfast. They’re a signature food of the southern states and are often served with butter or gravy.
How is it made?
American biscuits are a form of quickbread. Chemically leavened, with fats worked into the flour.
Super simple in terms of ingredients, and fairly easy to make (though also easy enough to screw up).
You take your flour w/leaveners, then cut in whatever fat you’re using; butter, lard, bacon grease, shortening, whatever.
Then mix in the liquid. It’s usually milk, or milk products like buttermilk.
From there you very gently work the dough until it’s sticky and can be formed.
If you want flakier biscuits, you roll and fold a bit, getting laminations and then cutting. If you want them soft and fluffy, do nothing but form them into balls by hand. In between, you roll them out to preferred thickness then cut. Cutting can be like in this post, or using a round cutter.
You then place them on a lightly greased pan. If you want softer sides, you place them close enough together to make sure they touch as they rise in the oven. For crusty sides, give them space.
Biscuits, particularly southern style biscuits, are an art form of sorts. The least rigid kind of baking there is imo. There’s a ton of variation in textures and flavor.
Very good explanation, thank you.
spoiler
- 250 g AP flour
- 1 TBSP sugar
- 1 TBSP baking powder
- Pinch salt
- 6 Tbsp (90 g) butter (cold)
- 2 Tbsp (30 g) butter (melted for topping)
- ~2/3 cup (~150 ml) whole mil
Add flour, sugar, baking powder and salt to bowl. Take your very cold butter, and grate it into the dry ingredients using a box grater. Quickly work the butter into the flour mix with a fork or your hands. Add a portion of the milk, and mix until a shaggy dough forms, adding more milk as necessary (I did not use the full allotment). Turn out onto a work surface dusted with flour. Knead with your hands until you have a solid mass which does not stick to your work surface. Roll it into a rough ball/lump, then flatten it out into a rough rectangle approximately 1 inch thick. Fold one half of the rectangle on top of the other half, and then knead it back out to a 1 thick rectangle. Turn the dough 90 degrees, and repeat a couple times. I think I maybe did 5 reps. Once you have your final rectangle, cut out your biscuit rounds if you have the tool to do so. I did not, so I just cut the rectangle into thirds and then half using a chef’s knife. Lubed a baking pan with cooking spray, hucked the bits of dough in, and set into a 425 degree F (~220 C) oven. Baked until the dough had puffed up at least twice it’s initial size, and the surface was dry and unyielding to my finger (roughly 15, 20 min? I don’t know, tbh, this was all feel at this point). Notably, the biscuits had not acquired much of any color other than their bottoms. I was worried about over cooking them or scorching the bottoms if I let it go until the tops were golden brown, so I brushed them down with butter and then hit em with a full broiler grill fro several minutes, until the coloration seen here was achieved. Reapplied more melted butter, cracked over some fresh salt, and voila.
here is the process that i used this morning. the other posters are correct that American biscuits are apparently quite different than what biscuits are elsewhere. as someone else shared with you, I’ve often heard that the closest European equivalent would be a butter scone, but I’ve also heard folks who care more than I about these things that that’s also not exactly 1:1. in any case, it’s a very lightly sweet and buttery quickbread. it has a crispy exterior, and a very soft, tender crumb interior, sometimes with distinct, laminated layers (similar in principle to a croissant). it is equally at home in both savory and sweet applications. this morning, I ate them with elderberry jam, while I served them as a side for beef stew this evening. I used it to sop up the remnants in my bowl. equally delicious.
Thank you!
The fairly high butter content and usage of baking powder kinda explains the texture you described but is also visible in the photo.
Think savoury scone and you’re most of the way there.
To add to this, there are drop biscuits and flaky biscuits (the southern kind, seen above). Drop biscuits can be like a much softer, more savory scone, but flaky biscuits are much lighter and layered, almost like a savory pastry often served with sausage gravy or red eye gravy.
since you brought red-eye gravy up, are your familiar with its preparation? I’ve read that it’s often made by frying up a ham steak with maybe a little supplementary fat (butter, lard, or bacon grease) and creating a roux from the drippings. rather than milk, as might be done with sawmill/country gravy, the liquid added is strong black coffee.
this combination of ham, coffee, and roux has long fascinated me, as I imagine a real roller coaster of flavors there. however, I’ve not had the opportunity to order it in a real Southern diner, so I don’t know if I’m off-base here, especially because, as I think about it, I’m pretty sure the first time I came across the dish as a concept was in an alternate-history novel in which racist South Africans time travel to the American Civil War and hand out AK-47s to the Army of Northern Virginia. In other words, citation very much needed lol.
Honestly, I’m probably not the best person to ask. I grew up in an area that was fairly rural, but very far north, so people used the term “red eye gravy” very loosely to refer to biscuit gravy made with strong black coffee. Ham may or may not have been involved, and often it was made with a roux made of bacon fat. Generally the biscuits where I grew up were drop biscuits. I’ve been vegan for more than a decade now so it’s been a loooooooong time since I made it myself and I usually just used left over bacon grease, although my understanding is that authentic red eye gravy is generally made with country ham drippings, that’s correct.
Here’s a decent example of a recipe for this kind of biscuit. Lots of butter. Work the dough as little as possible so it stays flaky. Some recipes call for folding the dough a few times to create more distinct layers. https://www.melissassouthernstylekitchen.com/fluffy-southern-buttermilk-biscuits/
I’ve had British friends describe US biscuits as “butter scones.” They can be slightly savory, or slightly sweet, but only slightly.
Dude!
Dude!
Look at that fucking crust, all golden brown and sexy.
You gotta throw an nsfw tag on those biscuits!
Thank you! The broiler did most of the work at the end there.
Your biscuits are square!
Did you fill the pan with dough and then cut them before baking? Questions.
The other reply is correct that I used a knife to cut my final rectangle of a dough into 6 pieces. Like I said, I very rarely bake, so I don’t actually own any biscuit cutters. Plus, part of the exercise today was to get me to let go of the block if have in my head about baking being fussy, so this was a (somewhat) intentional rustic approach to the dish. After cutting the dough into individual pieces, they all fit into the bottom of that square pan, with a couple centimeters to spare between most of them. I figured that if they expanded against one another, that would actually help push the rise further vertically, so I wasn’t bothered by merging if it occurred. However, it turned out that the majority grew straight up rather than out, and most of them were fully freestanding when done baking.
Thank you! This is exactly what I wanted to know.
you’re very welcome! I posted the full recipe a couple of times elsewhere in the thread, and I can recommend it if you’ve got an hour and want to try something different for breakfast. easy enough that a total novice was able to get good results!
Square biscuits have advantages. First off, you can cut them with a sharp knife instead of pinching your layers closed with a biscuit cutter. Second, their’s less waste and effort because you can roll up the trimmings for an extra “biscuit” instead of re-rolling out the scraps and cutting again. Third, they can sit closely in the pan to help each other rise.
Ohh these look so good. Do you have a recipe?
- 250 g AP flour
- 1 TBSP sugar
- 1 TBSP baking powder
- Pinch salt
- 6 Tbsp (90 g) butter (cold)
- 2 Tbsp (30 g) butter (melted for topping)
- ~2/3 cup (~150 ml) whole mil
Add flour, sugar, baking powder and salt to bowl. Take your very cold butter, and grate it into the dry ingredients using a box grater. Quickly work the butter into the flour mix with a fork or your hands. Add a portion of the milk, and mix until a shaggy dough forms, adding more milk as necessary (I did not use the full allotment). Turn out onto a work surface dusted with flour. Knead with your hands until you have a solid mass which does not stick to your work surface. Roll it into a rough ball/lump, then flatten it out into a rough rectangle approximately 1 inch thick. Fold one half of the rectangle on top of the other half, and then knead it back out to a 1 thick rectangle. Turn the dough 90 degrees, and repeat a couple times. I think I maybe did 5 reps. Once you have your final rectangle, cut out your biscuit rounds if you have the tool to do so. I did not, so I just cut the rectangle into thirds and then half using a chef’s knife. Lubed a baking pan with cooking spray, hucked the bits of dough in, and set into a 425 degree F (~220 C) oven. Baked until the dough had puffed up at least twice it’s initial size, and the surface was dry and unyielding to my finger (roughly 15, 20 min? I don’t know, tbh, this was all feel at this point). Notably, the biscuits had not acquired much of any color other than their bottoms. I was worried about over cooking them or scorching the bottoms if I let it go until the tops were golden brown, so I brushed them down with butter and then hit em with a full broiler grill fro several minutes, until the coloration seen here was achieved. Reapplied more melted butter, cracked over some fresh salt, and voila.
Well butter your biscuits!
Liberally, and frequently!
Those look scrumptious! ❤️ Did you sprinkle sugar or salt on top?
Salt! I used salted butter, so I had not added any to the actual dough. My first sample told me I needed a little more salt to balance out the sweet, so I spread a little more melted butter on top and cracked over a bit of salt. Vast improvement!
Those look practically as flakey as a croissant 🤤
Helluva lot better looking than the bread I made yesterday. IDK how or why, but before popping it in the oven, it had risen so high out of my pan, I thought about cutting some off so it wouldnt spill and make a mess. Thank god I didn’t, becsuse it ended up shrinking in the oven and I ended up with a loaf only half an inch tall. I had made it so I could make a PB sandwich 😮💨
It tasted fine, but had the texture and crumble of a dry cake. I made it the exact same as I always do so I have no idea what could have gone wrong.
I sympathize with you entirely. While I know there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for almost every baking mishap (too dry, too wet, too much gluten, not nearly enough, overworked, underworked, and on and on), I can’t help but feel that some loaves are just cursed by fate
Not an expert, but I think that means you overproofed your dough. Is that a possibility?
