Southern Biscuits

by Dupree, Nathalie; Graubart, Cynthia; McKee, Rick

• ISBN13: 9781423621768
• ISBN10: 142362176X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-01
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Summary

Southern Biscuits features recipes and baking secrets for every biscuit imaginable, including hassle-free easy biscuits to embellished biscuits laced with silky goat butter, crunchy pecans, or tangy pimento cheese. The traditional biscuits in this book encompass a number of types, from beaten biscuits of the Old South and England, to Angel Biscuits-a yeast biscuit sturdy enough to split and fill but light enough to melt in your mouth. Filled with beautiful photography, including dozens of how-to photos showing how to mix, stir, fold, roll, and knead, Southern Biscuits is the definitive biscuit baking book.

Excerpts

WHAT I S A BISCUIT?

A biscuit was originally made out of flour and water, the basis of hardtack carried by early travelers. Ultimately, alittle lard was added, the dough was beaten hours before shaping and baking, the final product holding a littleslivered country ham, becoming a gourmet's delight called a Beaten Biscuit. (We now make it with a food processorin five minutes.)

Once baking powder was developed in the 1800s-replacing the potash that had been used as a leavening-it was added to the same flour and water and, mixed together and shaped into a round, it became a biscuit. (These are still eaten today as Dorm Biscuits.) Any other addition is an extension of the cook's imagination, whether whole milk, buttermilk, sour cream, yogurt, whipping cream, shortening, lard, or butter are used. Each adds a different capacity for leavening or flavoring.

The lightest biscuits are made out of delicate white winter-wheat flour, also called "soft wheat" due to its lowgluten content. With the addition of a fat and a liquid, usually milk or buttermilk, they are a close cousin toscones, containing sugar and possibly an egg, which the English fill with clotted cream and raspberries and servefor tea, not for breakfast or another meal. The English biscuit, which is a cookie, bears no relation to a scone.The French have a cake-type called "biscuit," which neither cookie, bread, nor scone. There was no agreementover the years about how to spell, define, or pronounce the name of our bread. It just was.