Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation High-Rise Biscuits

FWIW, I think I've finally found the secrets to perfect biscuits.
If you try 'em, let me know how you like 'em.
NOTICE: This recipe makes a very, very wet dough that you "drop" instead of the usual roll-and-cut routine.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbs sugar
1 Tbs double-acting baking powder (Calumet or Clabber Girl makes �em rise higher but leaves �em yellow inside. Single-acting baking powder makes �em white inside, but they don�t rise as high.)
� tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1� cups low-fat buttermilk
4 Tbs chilled butter (�-inch chunks)

plus:
1 cup flour
2 Tbs butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 500� F with the rack in the middle. Spray a 9-inch round cake pan and a �-cup dry-measure cup (both the inside and the outside of the cup) with nonstick spray.

Mix the flour, the baking powder, the sugar, the salt, and the baking soda.

Scatter the �-inch cubes of cold butter evenly over the dry dough.

Mix the dry dough until it looks like coarse, pebbly corn meal.

Move the dry dough into a medium bowl.

Add the buttermilk to the dry dough and stir it in with a rubber spatula until the very wet, lumpy dough is evenly mixed.

Scoop level �-cup blobs and drop them onto a floured cookie sheet.

Dust the top of each blob with flour.

With floured hands, pick-up each blob and coat it generously with flour.

Gently shape each blob into a ball, shake-off the excess flour, and set it in the cake pan. Arrange the blobs first around the perimeter of the pan, then in the center of the pan, just touching each other. (Don�t space �em; don�t crowd �em.)

Gently brush the tops with hot butter.

Bake the pan of biscuits 5 minutes at 500� F, then reduce the heat to 450� and bake them another 15 minutes.

Let them cool in the pan for 2 minutes. Invert the pan and drop the biscuits onto a clean towel. Turn them right-side up and separate them.

Cool the biscuits another 5 minutes (to let their insides dry-out completely), then serve them. This recipe makes 12 biscuits.

Ken, that's pretty close to the old drop biscuit recipe. Reminds me of a story (most things do <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> ) Way long time back they had what was called then Home Demonstration Agents, female side of the County Agents from the USDA. The county agents taught how to farm and the "Homely demonstrators" as we called them taught the women folks how to keep house in the government way. My grandmaw went to the first meeting they had. My grandmaw was the greatest cook in the world ( ain't most grandmaws that way? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> )
We were siting at the dinner table for Sunday dinner with grandmaw. Pop says, "What did they teach at the home demonstration meeting?"

"How to make buiscuits," grandmaw said, kind of coloring up a little.

"Mama, how long you been making biscuits?" Pop said.

"About sixty years," grandmaw said.

"Learn anything new?" Pop asked.

"Shut up, boy." <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />




BCR

It's the little differences that make the big differences here. "Drop biscuits" refers to a method first and only coincidentally to a recipe. The recipe that I posted just happens to be an example of the method -- just a coincidental requirement of the dough produced by this recipe. The differences that count -- results of much and varied experimenting with fine-tuning the details -- are in the nature and proportions of the ingredients. Drop biscuits ain't all created equal. For example:
� Cake flour biscuits had less flavor, and their tops were not as crisp.
� Butter gave these biscuits more flavor than lard, Crisco, or any combination.
� Nonfat buttermilk produced texture and flavor not as rich as biscuits made with low-fat buttermilk.
� Oven temperatures -- biscuits rose well at 500� F, but tops browned too quickly in an oven left at 500� F for the entire baking period.
� Cooling -- in bisuits hot from the oven, internal moisture kept the insides too moist and gluey. The cooling period let the retained internal steam escape.

The lady who developed this recipe tried over a hundred carefully planned variations of the above and taste-tested each batch with volunteer tasters -- an excellent example of how shooters presumably fine-tune their handloads. I just may include her experiments and her biscuit recipe in Loading and Testing Custom Cartridges as an excellent model for handloaders. Like a handloader using data from a manual, she started with a recipe (from a 1997 cook book) that gave her good biscuits (but perhaps not as good as they could be). In the end, she had a recipe for even better biscuits.

If only I could eat 'em ....

... a syndrome all too familiar here!