(That's chicken schnitzel with lemon-caper browned butter sitting next to the biscuit)
I think I'm finally ready to talk about biscuits. For 40+ years I used a recipe from the Time-Life Books Foods of the World, Recipes: American Cooking. For a few years I subscribed to this series, which featured a different country each month, and had lovely photos of the different regions, and even some of the food. It was sort of a travelogue for eaters. My first forays into French cooking were from the French Provencial volume, and they were mostly successful. What I now know is that these recipes had been dumbed down significantly. It was sort of Julia Child meets Betty Crocker. Now that I think of it, that probably characterizes the late 1960s and early 1970s when this series was popular.
So this biscuit recipe was very, very simple. And while the biscuits were good, they were never great. In the past few years I have tried any number of recipes, from magazines, cookbooks, the internet, even a video from the NY Times. And as I mentioned at the very beginning of this blog, I was always looking for that certain texture and taste that I remembered from some very special biscuits made by a true Southern cook. Now most of the more recent recipes that have been featured in publications are made with butter. And the author will rhapsodize about how wonderful, light, and true they taste. But when I make them, the butter would inevitably make the biscuits more dense than light. As usual, there were the usual caveats about keeping the butter very cold, barely touching the dough, etc. Where you can get away with that with scones, which can be shaped on a baking sheet and cut apart, it is much more difficult with biscuits which need to be rolled out and then cut with a biscuit cutter.
One option is to pat the biscuits rather than roll them, and again cut them on a baking sheet, which minimizes handling. However, for a true, flaky biscuit, it is necessary to roll them and fold them several times, creating layers. Maybe this is partly semantics. If the biscuit is made very much like a scone, it can have the kind of flakiness found in pie crust. But it won't have layers. If it is rolled and folded, it will have layers that allow you to break it apart to spread butter on it. Perhaps it's a matter of preference or maybe they're each good in their own way. So begins the great biscuit experiment.
For Part 1, we'll start with the baking powder biscuits made with shortening. The following discussion will be of most interest to those of you who care about the chemistry of baking. There's a wonderful reference book I use, CookWise, by Shirley Corriher, that answers any science-y question you might have. Feel free to skip ahead to the recipe if you don't require that level of detail, although the recipe is the end result of this particular science experiment.
The first important variable when making baking powder biscuits is the type of flour used: White Lily, All-Purpose flour, or King Arthur Perfect Pastry Blend. The main difference between them is the protein per gram ratio. White Lily, which is a Southern flour, is moderately low protein (9 grams/cup), and King Arthur unbleached all-purpose, which is a Northern flour is relatively high in protein (13 grams/cup). Perfect Pastry Blend is in the middle (10.3 grams/cup). What you can deduce is that climate and growing season, along with soil, create variations in the protein content of the wheat. And they are different, both in how they feel to work with and how they taste.
Next is leavening. Baking soda and baking powder are chemical leaveners. Baking soda alone breaks down to produce carbon dioxide gas and sodium carbonate, which has an unpleasant soapy taste and is moderately alkaline. If it is combined with an acid (such as chocolate, honey, molasses, citrus juice, buttermilk, brown sugar, to name a few) the carbon dioxide gas comes off much faster and a small amount of a milder-tasting salt is left behind. Baking powder contains both baking soda and the exact amount of acid to use up all the soda. It also contains cornstarch to separate these two ingredients to keep both ingredients dry. What we find in grocery stores is double-acting baking powder, which contains both a fast-dissolving and a slow-dissolving acidic ingredient to produce a small amount of gas during mixing, then a maximum amount in the hot oven.
It may seem redundant to use both baking powder and baking soda in these biscuits, but there are good reasons to do so. While baking powder is very reliable since it has just the right amount of acid for the amount of soda, when you use buttermilk, adding a little soda will neutralize the extra acidity. And buttermilk is useful in baked goods because its acidity makes it an excellent tenderizer of the proteins in the wheat.
Also a word to the wise. Although the right amount of baking powder will cause your baked goods to rise, too much will actually cause them to fall because the bubbles get big, float to the top, and pop! Sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing. So it's all about proportions.
And finally, there's the fat. I have a sneaking hunch that the biscuits I loved so much in college were made with lard. Crisco, which is vegetable shortening, is the next closest thing. Biscuits 2 will compare fats in making biscuits.
Baking Powder Biscuits
3 cups flour (12.75 oz All-purpose flour, 12 oz. Perfect Pastry Blend, or 12 oz. White Lily)
3 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
2 Tablespoons melted butter
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Be sure to give the oven plenty of time to get good and hot.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Note on the photos: I made SO MANY batches of biscuits this week for comparison purposes, that I only made a half a recipe each time. A half batch makes 6 or 7 biscuits, and a whole batch will make 12-14.
Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large mixing bowl. Add the shortening,
Make a well in the center, and pour in the buttermilk.
Mix together with a fork only long enough to form a soft dough.
Using a bowl scraper, gather all of the ingredients together,
And scrape it out onto a floured board. By the way, you always flour the board with AP flour, regardless of which type you are using for the biscuits or pastry.
Flatten it out, then fold it about five or six times, like this:
Cut the dough into 2 1/2"-inch rounds with a cookie cutter. Be sure to cut cleanly down and do not twist the cookie cutter or it will prevent the layers from separating and rising fully. You can see that there are visible layers in the dough.
Gather together any remaining scraps of dough, roll out again and cut into more rounds.
Arrange biscuits on the baking sheet, leaving about an inch between them. I can never resist gathering up the last of the scraps and making a rather sad and misshapened one at the end.
Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 minutes.
Brush melted butter on the tops and return to the oven for 8 minutes or until the biscuits are a delicate golden brown. Serve hot.
Note on the experiment: My original recipe called for 2 Tablespoons of baking powder, and I always made them that way. After reading CookWise I realized that for 3 cups of flour, it should be no more than 3 3/4 teaspoons. So I adjusted the recipe, and voila, they suddenly rose much more!
Below you can see the difference between AP flour on the left and Pastry flour on the right. The softer pastry flour allows the leaveners to work somewhat better, so the biscuit is taller, and definitely lighter. There was no difference in height between the Perfect Pastry Blend and White Lily, but I preferred the taste of the Perfect Pastry Blend. I guess I'm a northerner after all.
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