It reminds me a fair bit of the technique for Dutch Baby (aka German Pancake aka Bismarck) and the butter does bloom up from the bottom (or, more likely from watching those, around the edges) and get somewhat integrated in those preps.
Yes indeed. Or just better editing up front. These publishers know that the cooks/writers get tired and make mistakes. They should have food-knowledgeable proof-readers going through the recipes. I mean, the â2 Tbsâ jumped out to me immediately as a salt bomb. Similarly the problem with the 9 square vs. 9 round.
These items should also have stood out to any such proofer. But I guess the publishing houses are using unpaid interns or some such to proof the recipes nowadaysâŚ
(end rant, LoL).
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The Post version calls for 2 teaspoons of fine sea salt. They just finished a big revamp of their recipe database and made an editorial decision to use fine sea salt for most recipes.
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Thatâs interesting, but could also mess some stuff up, especially if they simply switched types of salts, without attention to amounts? In the comments section the author equates 2 tsp fine sea salt to 2 tsp table salt, ânot kosher or flaky saltâ. Just wondering if they had recipes calling for X Tbs kosher and their database update now calls for the same X Tbs fine sea salt.
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Here is the article about the change. I guess it was longer ago than I recalled but theyâve been revamping recipes for a while now. Should be a gift link below
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I used a cast iron frying pan cornbread (southern style, no flour) recipe once that specified heating the bacon grease first in the pan in preheated hot oven. Then you carefully pull out the pan, dump the prepared batter in, and quicthe kly stir it before putting it back in the oven. It worked really well. The recipe made a fairly short cornbread round and the batter browned on the bottom and edges quickly on contact with the hot pan.
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Like journalism, print everywhere has gone down the tubes. I cannot believe the amount of typos and nonsensical grammar out there now, especially online. Iâm guilty of many typos, but then again, Iâm not a professional (anymore). Parce out! (That is a joke.)
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That doesnât seem to be the instructions for the biscuits though.
The gift link I provided
https://wapo.st/3MGwmOG
is the recipe for the butter swim biscuits. I just tried it.
You have to scroll down to see the ingredients and the instructions.
The gift link tcamp provided was to the article explaining why WaPo switched to fine sea salt.
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Autocorrect has a lot to do with that online. If the OP isnât really careful to check every word, lots of nonsense gets generated and posted.
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So did you enjoy them? Did you find the flavor or texture was affected by the method of sitting a basically nonfat batter in a pool of butter? Iâd seen the recipe. I was just wondering about the end product.
I havenât tried it yet. Iâll post here when I do. I donât have an 9 x 9 square baking dish, so will either use my 8 x 8 or my cast iron frying pan.
Iâm wondering if thatâs why they tell you to run a knife through it, making a tic-tac-toe grid. Maybe some of the butter seeps up. But from comments under the WaPo article (or somewhere, where I was reading comments on that recipe), several people also said there was kind of a soaking in from the sides aspect to it.
Perhaps. But it just seems really odd to me. Yes, youâre saving work, but at what cost? Do we want biscuits with only surface level butter? Then you kind of get 2 doughs - a too fat and a too lean. That was my cornbread experience, which is why I mentioned it.
I remembered this discussion because I just came across this recipe:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/savoy-sponge-cake/
And they instruct people to seek out potato flour rather than starch when the recipe is supposed to be made with potato starch. I am guessing the book itself is the issue, as they translated potato starch to flour, which is a common problem when European recipes come to this side of the Atlantic, where we have both potato starch and actual potato flour. Also Hermeâs books have often suffered from poor translations.
A search for this recipe in French leaves no question that this should be made with starch.
So thatâs another recipe they should take a look at.
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I made this last night. I used an 8x8 glass pan. I recommend putting a sheet pan on a rack below or the bottom of the oven. The pan got pretty full and a tiny amount of butter escaped the sides. I considered reducing the recipe by about 20% to account for the size of the pan but decided that was too much trouble. It came out fine.
These were very easy to make and if I was going to make a drop style biscuit, I would make these again. I liked how brown and crispy the sides got. When I made the cuts, butter came up the sides and covered the top. If I have time tomorrow, I will post some pictures of the final product. It is a fluffy biscuit. I prefer a flaky layered type but I am not very good at making them. I think I mentioned in a prior post about biscuits that my favorite all time biscuit was made by a New Yorker. I have tried using Lilly white, both the self rise and light. I did not find that it made my biscuits any better. This time I used Bobâs Red mill AP. I think my batter was thicker than recipe intended.
ETA Pictures:
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I did not notice any butter coming up where the cuts were made but as I mentioned in my first post, the butter did seep to the top. There was no browning on the cut sides. It did make it easy to serve.
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Thanks much for the info. How did you and your family like it? (EDIT - Oh, I see you already talked about how it turned out above.)
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Swim biscuit feedback - I made them last night. The short - we wonât make them again. The long - lean biscuit batter isnât bad, compared to lean cornbread batter. And the butter on the bottom gives the biscuit a nice crunch. However. The butter doesnât seep up through the dough particularly. So what you are left with is a very greasy, very buttery bottom. Imagine an ombre piece of cake, but rather than color saturating one level and then gradually diminishing, itâs butter. 2 of my 3 eaters would not recommend, would not repeat, and arguably rejected. And they described the dough as cakey. Since there is no butter steam driven rise within the layers, you get no air and no layers. And no separation. So it is what it is, but it isnât a biscuit.
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