biscuits and how it goes

[mrissa]

Oh, biscuit dough! Homemade buttermilk biscuit dough! I swear it's a miracle I didn't eat, like, three biscuits worth of dough just standing there before the oven was heated, because the snips I did have tasted better than anything else I've eaten in the last three weeks. How does it taste so good with so few ingredients? I now have a nice heavy round cutter to make traditional round biscuits with, so I'm still perfecting my technique for handling the dough minimally so that it rises more in the baking. But even my imperfect, slightly flat first-time-making-cut-biscuits biscuits were so much better than the chop-drop-and-burn variety they sell in the little cardboard-and-metal tubes, I just can't see why anyone would bother with the pre-made doughs. The homemade kind is so easy and so much better. (Perhaps it's that they don't own a pastry blender. That thing is on my list of $6 tools that routinely improve my life. I'm not sure how I ever managed without one. I use it far more than my bread machine, so on a per-dollar basis the difference is astronomical.)

In other news, I finally found a way into "The Radioactive Etiquette Book." So I can write that. So that's good. I thought I had a way in severalmany weeks ago when I did a title survey, and I got in the shower and thought of how the words might feel, and then when I got out of the shower the phone rang, and the Person from Politics (I know it's traditionally Porlock, but this is an election year here) derailed my thinking about it, and when I got back to it, the way in was gone like snow in the back of your wardrobe. I wrote two separate false pages of it, and they were wrong and sounded hollow. They were pages of prose from someone who is reasonably competent at making prose and has no reason whatever to make this prose.

I don't mean that I didn't have a plot. I can make up a plot; that's what we do around here. We say "what if he wanted to go home and couldn't get there" or "she's trying to figure this thing out and here's what she doesn't know" or what have you, and there you go, onwards, plot, hurrah. It's the feel of the prose itself. Stories are not made of plot, they're made of words (or notes or pictures or what have you, but the ones I do are words). I can sound completely sensible about how a story is going to go, who is going to do what in it and why, but if I can't write you at least a couple of consecutive paragraphs of it, I don't really know how the story is going to go. Voice, mode, whatever you want to call it, all I know is that if it's not there, I might as well open another file and write something else. There are several stories fully outlined with all sorts of touchstones noted in, but nobody's talking, so there they sit outlined, and may sit forever for all I know.

Anyway, it's there now, which is good, because it's all very well to say I might as well open another file and write something else, but I wanted to write this. So okay then.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Biscuit recipe? Please?

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

LOL - you beat me to it.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

::high five::

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's this one (http://www.recipezaar.com/26110).

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

If there's a potential problem of toughening the gluten, wouldn't it be better to use patisserie (SR) flour in the first place? Is there some reason I'm missing for using all purpose+raising agents instead? I've never made biscuits but I have made scones a zillion times, and biscuits as I have eaten them seem very similar, and I make scones with patisserie flour.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Patisserie flour is not advertised as such if we have it at Byerly's at all. Is SR for self-rising? In any case, I'm not sure it would come out tasting like a baking powder biscuit, which is the other name I've heard used for buttermilk biscuits. Might be worth a try, though.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they list it as cake flour. Here in the south, there's a preference for soft wheat flours for biscuit-making--that's what local favorites like Martha White and White Lily flours are.

[brooksmoses]

Thank you! You may have partly solved one of my wife's long-standing mysteries, of why her biscuits never come out as fluffy as the ones her grandmother made. Her grandmother used Martha White flour.

(And probably also used buttermilk without commercial additives, as noted downthread, but definitely the flour.)

Thank you!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I was halfway through the first paragraph before I remembered about cookies and biscuits and scones, and had to recalibrate.

I too have made scones with SR (plus added baking powder); the only reason I don't now is that I no longer buy SR flour (plain, wholemeal, and sometines rye or bere seems like enough bags of flour for one household that doesn't bake very often).

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhhh, homemade biscuits! Recipe, please?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See above.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I found "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing" by Ben Yagoda to be very helpful. It's not a style guide or how-to; instead it's a brainy examination of how writers create and use a style, with a bias toward idiosyncratic voices.

It really helped me start to see style & voice as consciously constructible things, rather than as a set of immutable rules.

[/unsolicited advice]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Immutable rules have never been a problem for me in that area.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I wasn't meaning to suggest that they were--just that this particular book says "here is how various writers create a voice for a piece of writing" rather than "here is what writing should sound like." So it's something that an experienced writer might find interesting, rather than being primarily for neophytes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yah, an exploration of different approaches is often more interesting to experienced people than a treatise on just one.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

*Looks up pastry blender* Oh, one of those - a sort of potato masher, only for rubbing in pastry. They appear to be called pastry blenders here, too, so I have no real excuse for trying to imagine a sort of pastry-making liquidiser. If I ever suspect I'll be making lots of pastry, that looks pretty useful.

Biscuits sound pretty much like scones, except with buttermilk. Do you have to be careful to press straight down with the cutter and not twist it with biscuits? I took ages to get out of the habit of doing that with scones, so they kept coming up all cockeyed. Oh, and that recipe says that you can freeze them uncooked. That'd be really handy, if it works with scone dough, too. I might experiment, next time I'm in a baking mood.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know about your particular recipe, but in general I have known scone dough to be perfectly well freezable. There's a bakery up in South Mpls that sells frozen scone dough, even (but I'd rather make my own).

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

That's good to know - thanks!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I call mine a magic pastry fork, because that's what the person who gave me one called it.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Yes, they're similar in that way. To make biscuits rise light and straight, you need to use a very sharp cutter and no twist.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

Stories are not made of plot, they're made of words (or notes or pictures or what have you, but the ones I do are words).

Yes, exactly. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I say I follow the words until I figure out where they're going.

[sraun]

One Sunday I told my mother I'd made buttermilk biscuits for breakfast, and she asked where'd I'd gotten them (sounding very confused!). I replied 'the dairy section of the grocery store' (I'd actually gotten the not great ones in a tube). We finally figured out that she'd heard "powdermilk biscuits" - she'd been listening to Prairie Home Companion the previous evening.

I keep expecting some company to make a bisquick-like mix and sell it at Powerdermilk Biscuit Mix. With appropriate acknowledgment and compensation to Garrison Keilor, of course!

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

I was deeply disturbed to hear Prairie Home Companion sponsored by a real product the other day. (Caught a little bit of it on the car radio.) Sleep Number Beds, I think.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

My mama's biscuits are baking-powder biscuits with regular milk. So very yummy.

What kind of bread machine do you have? I'm pondering one, since my tendinitis means I have a choice of knitting or kneading. (See icon for the winner.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Breadmaster. I'm not sure whether we would be more thrilled with it if it was a different brand or if we are just bread-picky; the latter seems highly likely. We just can't get the texture of crumb we like with the stuff we've tried in it.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to compromise, at this point. Bread-robot bread is better than a) storebought; b) killing my arms with kneading; c) nothing.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

I like to eat biscuit dough, too. My husband thinks it's disgusting. Yum!

I have mastered the biscuit. I mean I've really kicked its ass. I use White Lily self rising flour. This stuff is amazing. You *might* find it at Byerly's. It's somewhat of a regional thing, but you're not too far out of my region. Self rising flour has the salt and baking powder added, so it's the same stuff. You could use cake flour, or any other flour made with *soft* wheat. Since you live in the north, your regional all purpose flour is likely to be hard durum wheat, and that is better for breads and not so good for biscuits.

I use butter as the fat in my biscuits, since we don't eat shortening anymore. Lard works, but I find the taste too obtrusive. Butter is divine. Coconut oil works well, too, as long as it's refined and doesn't have a coconut taste.

Last ingredient: buttermilk. We get buttermilk from a local dairy, from which we also order milk. It is DIVINE. After using the dairy buttermilk, we bought buttermilk from the regular grocery, and could not figure out why our pancakes did not come out as wonderfully light and fluffy. My husband finally checked the ingredients list, and the grocery-store buttermilk has stuff like gelatin in it and other additives which are the kinds of things commonly added to bread to condition the dough. In other words, we believe that the additives in commercial buttermilk flatten and toughen your pancakes and other baking powder risen goodies. We go through a quart of buttermilk a week, now that we've found how wonderful it is, and how many recipes we can use it with.

After all of that, I am agnostic on the question of whether to roll or drop. I believe it depends on how clean your kitchen is when you start. If your dirty dishes are stacked up to the ceiling, go with drop biscuits.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, timprov is very fond of rolled biscuits, and markgritter and I don't have a clear preference, so I think we're going to lean towards rolled when possible.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I pretty much have to use a pastry blender, fork, or some other tool, because my hands are way to hot and they will melt the butter/shortening/lard too much for proper biscuits if I cut it in with my hands.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

I learned to mix dough with my mom's old Foley Fork, which they don't make anymore. The closest you can get to one these days is a blending fork. http://www.kitchenkrafts.com/product.asp?pn=BE1123&bhcd2=1225406473 I can get by with a pastry blender (had to when I moved out and mom wouldn't let me take her Foley Fork!), but I still prefer the fork. I think it's a more natural movement, more like mixing.