My bag of White Lily Unbleached Self Rising flour clearly states non-aluminum baking powder on the front label.
Really good southern biscuits take practice. Mine turn out best when I start with really cold ingredients, mix quickly to a shaggy dough, turn out on a floured surface, then pat and roll, fold in half and repeat three times. Leave it an inch thick, cut straight down with a sharp biscuit cutter, place in a greased cast iron skillet and bake in a preheated oven at 450 for 15 minutes.
Itās common knowledge that Callieās uses cream cheese in their recipe as well as self rising flour.
Raising hand (and biscuits). TorontoJo on Chowhound posted a Buttermilk biscuit recipe and technique hints that hugely up-graded my biscuit-making. The key to tall biscuits is folding/patting the dough about 6 times, and finish by patting the dough to 1 inch tall then cutting. For small biscuits similar to the refrigerator biscuits of the 1970ās, pat the dough flatter - half-inch tall, and use a smaller cutter or 2-inch-acrosss drinking glass to cut out.
3 cups all purpose flour
1 - 2 T sugar (depends on how sweet you want your biscuit)
4 t baking powder
1 t salt
1 t baking soda
Ā¾ cup (1 Ā½ sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
1.5 - 2 cups buttermilk
Preheat oven to 425Ā°F.
Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in large bowl. Using fingertips, rub the chilled butter into dry ingredients until mixture resembles coarse meal. Make a well in the mixture, add 1.5 c. of buttermilk and stir/fold gently until evenly moistened. If it looks too dry add a more buttermilk a bit at a time until you get the texture you want. Itās ok to still have some dry crumbly bits.
Turn dough out onto a floured surface. With floured hands, use your fingertips to gently flatten out the dough. Fold the dough in half and flatten again (use a pastry scraper to lift up the dough if itās sticking to the counter. Repeat 5 or 6 times. Flatten the dough to about an inch thick and use a 2ā ā 2.5ā biscuit cutter to cut out rounds (donāt twist!).
For separate biscuits, place rounds about 2 inches apart on a baking sheet. For pull apart biscuits, place rounds lightly touching each other on a baking sheet or 9x13 cake pan.
For drop biscuits - Iāve never madeā¦
Donāt bother with turning the dough out. Just scoop about a 1/4 cup dough right from the bowl and drop onto baking sheet about 2 inches apart.
Bake until biscuits are golden brown on top, 13-15 minutes. Transfer to rack to cool.
5 Likes
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
23
I made biscuits yesterday and turned them into ham-egg-cheese biscuits for us. I used Chef Johnās recipe (mentioned above also) except I made a 1.6x amount based on the amount of buttermilk I had to use up.
I deviated in that I used a 3-inch cutter (vs. 2.5) and did 5 folding steps instead of 3, and in the final roll-out made it more of a circular shape hoping to cut down on the number of FrankenBiscuits (those pieced together after the first round it cut).
Having a need to use up buttermilk that was bought for some other recipe is the usual impetus for me to make biscuits. Less than once per month, at a guess.
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
27
Thanks, but sorry it did not work. I note the URL doesnāt have that long string of extraneous characters that Iād see when trying to post a gift link. But my experience is limited to my (former) NYT sub.
But it looks like Ms. Council agreed to have this recipe reprinted by Pioneer Woman as part of their bookclub reviews. Thereās a write-up about her and how she got started, along with the recipe.
Edit - thereās a mismatch in the instructions. Step 1 indicates a square casserole but step 3 says āhot cast iron skilletā. Then 4 says youāre sort of pre-cutting the dough (batter, actually) into ā3-inch squaresā, but again refers to āskilletā.
The square casserole should be the correct one. Hopefully this is on Pioneer Woman staff and not in the actual printed recipe in the book.
Sheās also got some really fun looking older biscuit recipes at her blog that Iād like to try.
ā¦the Sunday supper ritualā¦ at first ā¦ her husband, her two children, and maybe a friend or two, but soon word began to spread about her crisp-skinned, flavor-blasted fried chicken ā¦
āA friend brought two friends and then, next time, those friends invited someone else,ā she says. āEventually people showed up at my table that I had never seen before in my life!ā By 2013 Council had taken her Sunday supper to various Decatur-area event spaces and restaurants; she continues the pop-ups today under the name Soul and Food Sunday Supper Club.
Oops! Just noticed that was Wapo. I thought it was NYT. As a frustrated writer, and mother of a frustrated writer, I donāt mind paying for some periodicals, but I cancelled Wapo because of the comment section!
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
36
Turns out itās on both of them, in different ways. I found a google image of the recipe from the cookbook and step 1 says
Adjustā¦ Place the butter into a 9-inch cast-iron skillet or a 9-by-9-inch casserole dish and set inside the oven while it is preheating.
The PW repub left out the āa 9-inch cast-iron skillet orā part.
The rest of the recipe is as-republished by PW, including all further references being to the skillet (not the square casserole), other than the step of cutting āinto 3-inch squaresā, which doesnāt match the use of the skillet.
But fundamentally thereās a problem with assuming either a 9x9 square or a 9-inch skillet work, and that is thereās no mention of adjusting cook time and temperature, given the product in the skillet (63.6 square inches) will be 27% deeper than in the casserole (81 square inch surface).
I still think (based on photos) that the published cooking temp is based on the square casserole. If I try it in the 9-inch CI skillet, Iāll probably drop the temp ~ 30 degrees, otherwise the surfaces may be too dark by the time the middle gets done. [ETA - On second thought, given how variable ovens can be, maybe the skillet users will just chalk up the extra time to temp variability and just keep sticking toothpicks in every few minutes until it gets done.]
Iām hoping this is just a 1-off.
Last edit, I promise; I gotta get moving on figuring out dinner anyway.
Note these Butter Swim Biscuits are salt bombs. One biscuit will be 1800 mg sodium, if your kosher salt is Morton, or about 1275 if Diamond Crystal.
Just to get a reference point, I checked the Chef John recipe above and they come in at 430 per biscuit (his recipe just says ā1 teaspoon saltā without any modifiers so I assumed granulated table salt at 7 grams salt per teaspoon or 2754 mg sodium per teaspoon).
Here is a WaPo gift link for the Butter Swim biscuit recipe that I just generated from my own personal subscription. I donāt know if it will work for more than one person.
The link includes this:
āCorrection: A previous version of this recipe included an option to bake the biscuits in a cast-iron skillet. We got more consistent results with the 9-inch baking dish. This version has been updated.ā
It also says āWhile we liked the salt-forward flavor of these biscuits, if you prefer something more subtle, drop the salt to 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons.ā
The WaPo photo shows a square 9" dish with about 1/2" or less clearance at the top. The photo in the cookbook looks more like a deep-ish rectangular enameled cast iron casserole to me, with about a 1" clearance at the top.
I have switched to using a thermo pen instant read thermometer to determine when baked goods are done. Iāll look around to see if I can find a pull temp recommendation for biscuits. Oh, I just read on King Arthur that the thermometer method works well for yeast breads but not as much for cakes, etc. They also recommend using a paring knife rather than a toothpick to test for doneness because the former has a larger surface area that more clearly reveals underbaked crumbs.
Iām actually the most curious about what these swim biscuits taste like, since all of the fat is at the bottom of the baking dish. None in the dough. Does it work and taste good? I tried to do something similar once with cornbread. Lots of bacon grease in the pan, very little fat in the batter. And it wasnāt good. Very dry inside. Very greasy outside.
3 Likes
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
39
Many thanks. Pretty much moots what I said. Except they kind of mumbled a bit when discussing the salt, saying āif you prefer something more subtle, drop the salt to 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoonsā instead of āWhoa! 2 Tablespoons was a mistake!ā
If it werenāt for the Wayback machine, Iād have thought I somehow confused teaspoons with tablespoons. But this shows the earlier pub as 2 Tbs not 2 tsp of salt.
Also this image shows the book itself was originally published instructing 2 Tablespoons, not teaspoons.
The book I recently purchased has 2 tbs of salt for this recipe. Clearly a typo. The book was published in July 2023. There is not a second edition as far as I can tell, and a second edition this soon would be unexpected.
