Breakfast - What's in Your Gullet?

It's been awhile

 

All these great biscuit photos gave me a craving so made a few biscuits this morning. No sausage in the house today and had to make do with blackberry honey and butter. The honey had started to crystallize a little bit, which actually gave it a neat texture.

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I prefer honey on warm biscuits.
No butter no jam no jelly give me honey!

 

I like biscuits just about any way I can get them. Warm with butter and honey or jam, with a sausage patty and some jam tucked inside, with ham, as a side dish to stew... I think I'm allergic to them, tho--they make me break out in fat.

 

Oh you guys (gals)! How bout a killer biscuit recipe?

 

I have an unnatural love for biscuits as a yankee.

 

I've never had biscuits come out well from a recipe. I made terrible biscuits until my college room mate took me home with her one weekend to a tiny town in Georgia (they had recently upgraded from a stop sign to a blinky light) and I watched her mama make biscuits. I stopped using recipes and my biscuits got better. My recipe is: Preheat oven to 500 degrees, grease a baking pan, and get out the blue mixing bowl (has to be the blue one!), dump in some flour until it looks right, then use your cupped hand to measure a little bit of salt, baking soda, baking powder, and maybe some sugar. Mash it up together real well with your fingers to remove any lumps (you can sift the dry ingredients if you want, but then you have something else to clean up), then add some crisco and mix it with your fingers some more, leaving lumps about the size of a pea. Add buttermilk (use the full fat kind if you can find it) and stir--you want just enough buttermilk so that everything is moistened and will clump together without any crumbly bits at the bottom. Don't over-stir. If it's too dry, add more buttermilk--too wet, take some out. Dump it out on a floured board and pat it gently into a rectangle about 1" thick, fold it over once and pat it out again into a rectangle 1" thick. Using a biscuit cutter (or a drinking glass dunked in flour) cut out your biscuits, then reshape the scraps and repeat. Put biscuits on baking sheet, put in the oven, and immediately turn down the temperature to 450 (don't forget or you'll be very sad.) Cook about 12 minutes or until starting to brown. Real helpful, huh?

I've never tried this recipe. It's from one of those fund-raising cookbooks that churches in the South put out where the little old ladies of the church contribute their "famous" recipes . It's always a bit dangerous--they might leave out something important just so that no one else's dish will ever taste as good as theirs does. It looks like it would make some dandy biscuits. The sour cream is an interesting addition. Now that I've looked it up I might have to try it:

 

OK, I decided to try these this morning since I had the ingredients (except butter-flavored crisco, which is an abomination. I used plain crisco.) Found a "typo"--that "1 tsp baking powder" should be "1 tsp baking SODA". They're in the oven now.

Will give an update after breakfast.

 

Torture... pure torture!

 

OK, I made a half batch of these this morning. They have a nice tender texture, but WAY too much baking powder--that's about all I could taste. I'd try them again and cut the baking powder in half. (I wonder if it should have been 3 tsp instead of 3 Tbsp baking powder. That's more in line with other biscuit recipes I've seen.) It took a fair amount of extra buttermilk to get the dough to the right consistency, too. I cut the crisco in before the sour cream--I think that's a good approach because the sour cream makes the dough a little gummy. So, a recipe worth trying--with some adjustments--if you've never made biscuits.

 

Had one with butter and some grade b maple syrup hot out of the oven. Helped cover up the baking powder flavor some, but they'd still be better with less.

 

thanks Lucretia! It is great to have a biscuit scientist on staff

 

"If it's too dry, add more buttermilk--too wet, take some out."

Sounds like magic to me. Maybe that's why I cannot aspire to being a chef, or even a reasonably proficient home cook -- I can't figure out how the pros are able to remove some buttermilk that they've already stirred into a flour mixture. (An amateur like me would probably try to add more flour to a too wet mixture, rather than remove some buttermilk.)

 

Larry passes the reading test!

I want to know how Toothpick makes his biscuits--they look particularly good.

 

Buttermilk Biscuits recipe



2 cups AP flour

2 tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 Tbl. Sugar

7 Tbl. Grated frozen butter

¾ cup cold buttermilk or ( ¾ cup cold whole milk and 1 Tbl. Vinegar) add more if dry, less if wet.



Sift all dry ingredients. Cut in grated frozen butter until pea sized crumbs form. Put back in freezer for 10 minutes. Remove add Buttermilk. Mix gently until flour just forms a shaggy mass. Pull dough onto a lightly floured surface and gently pat to ½ inch thickness. Cut with a biscuit cutter or water glass. Gently gather loose dough and pat again to desired thickness and cut. Keep doing that until dough is used up. The last couple pieces will be a little tougher and firmer than the others because they were worked more. Bake in a preheated 425* oven for 12 to 15 minutes. You can brush them with a little butter before you bake them but, that isn’t necessary. Enjoy with good jam, honey or sausage gravy.

 

MMmmmmMMM! Biscuits made with butter!

I've got some pork back fat in my freezer that I need to render and use for some biscuits and pie crusts.

 

that's what my dad does and he makes his bisquits in the cast iron skillet. Corn bread too. now I gotta make biscuits at work tomorrow.lol

 

sometimes he uses bacon fat when we go hunting

 

Need to try this!

 

Biscuits look alot like Scones, the best recipe I've tried is also the most simple. It's the CWA ( country women's association) Lemonade scone. ( our lemonade is like sprite)
Here's a link to the recipe, I've found they come out best if you bring the mixture together as gently as possible, and bake them close together to help the rise
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/16549/best+ever+scones