One of the first things I learned to bake when I was little, like seven or eight years old, was biscuits. Scoop the mix out of the Bisquick box, stir in milk, knead a few times, roll out, cut, and bake. The raw dough always tasted a bit chemical-ly to me, but I liked it. I still like Bisquick, but I don't think I've bought it in at least twenty years. I'm pretty committed to baking from scratch, and commercial mixes have a rather short shelf life.
So we've been making our biscuits from scratch for at least twenty years. Fortunately, the kids were so young when I started that they don't remember the taste of Bisquick. But I remember how fluffy Bisquick biscuits were, and honestly, I've never been able to duplicate it, even with using straight white all-purpose flour.
It was very disappointing. No matter what I did--more or less water, higher or lower temperature, more or less kneading. Nothing worked. The white flour biscuits were OK; the whole wheat ones were a little closer to hockey pucks.
Anyway, several months ago I came across an article by Amanda Mull, a proper young Southern woman attempting to make fluffy Southern biscuits in New York. Read her article to discover all the failures in her attempts to buy and/or recreate fluffy biscuits.
Or just continue reading here to get the true low-down.
Truth be told, it's all in the flour. And apparently, the perfect self-rising flour for perfectly light biscuits is called White Lily Flour. And it can only be purchased in the South. Or on Amazon, but you're going to pay several times more for it that way. And UPS doesn't deliver to TEOTWAWKI Town, so it's best to learn the work-around for this. (Historically, the wheat used in White Lily flour--soft white wheat--grew only in the South.)
Hard red wheat is not going to give you fluffy biscuits. Don't even go there.
Hard white wheat, a hybrid between hard red and soft white, is better than hard red, but honestly, the biscuits are only ok. Raise your kids with them, and you'll be fine. But if you're trying to please people who know better, you're going to need to use more white flour than whole wheat. And even then, it still doesn't work as well as you're telling yourself that it works. Hard white wheat works perfectly for bread and chocolate chip cookies. No one can tell a difference. But it's just not what you want for biscuits.
Soft white wheat is the way to go here. You can get it on Amazon, for a price of course, or you can get it much more reasonably from Honeyville Grain. I'm sure other retailers have it as well.
What a difference it makes! It's so exciting to find that my inability to make fluffy biscuits wasn't some kind of character flaw.
So this is what I did:
Grind your soft white wheat berries as finely as possible. (For the record, my soft white wheat berries are at least ten years old.) Use your favorite biscuit recipe. Here's what I used; after all, it has to be all food storage-friendly.
Perfectly Fluffy Buttermilk Biscuits
3/4 cup water
3 tablespoons dry milk powder
2 1/4 teaspoons lemon juice
2 cups soft white wheat flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup lard
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Combine the water, dry milk powder, and lemon juice (True Lemon crystallized juice packets substitute very well here), whisk well, and set aside for at least five minutes. In the meantime, combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Cut in lard until the mixture resembles cornmeal. After milk mixture has set for at least five minutes, stir it into the flour mixture. Because you are working with whole wheat, and whole wheat takes more time to absorb water, let it sit for five minutes before determining whether to add more flour. Add a tablespoon or two of additional flour, if necessary. Knead dough six to eight times, and then pat out. Cut out biscuits and place them on the baking sheet. Bake at 450 for 10-11 minutes.
Serve with butter (or coconut oil!) and jam. Preferably strawberry jam. Strawberry jam is the best.
Links to related posts:
Basic Food Storage--Wheat
For further reading:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-most-of-america-is-terrible-at-making-biscuits?utm_source=pocket-newtab
You can try buttermilk culture. My local grocery store has it on the top shelf above the evaporated and sweetened condensed milk.
ReplyDeleteIt is powdered, but I don't know it's shelf life offhand.
I sent some to someone in Canada so she could get her biscuits to rise.
And don't over work your dough.
What about pastry flour? Its a soft white flour. I see it occasionally in the big grocery store in the city.
ReplyDeleteExile1981
Google Lady says it's the best choice for biscuits. https://kitchenfiftyseven.com/which-flour-is-best-for-biscuits/ Good question!
DeleteAt the risk of losing my Southern membership card I make my biscuits with King Arthur AP flour. We have White Lily in the store (both regular and self rising) and another called Southern Biscuit (self rising). For me they just don't work as well as the KA flour. They do not bake up as high nor as flaky and to my husband the self-rising varieties taste too much like baking powder.
ReplyDeleteIn another heretical move I use kefir rather than buttermilk. I guess I'm suppose I am just a poor example of a good Southern wife, but I always have kefir on hand and rarely buttermilk.
I realize my recipe is not food storage friendly, but until TEOTWAWKI gets here there are my biscuits and I am sticking to them.
NCSophie
I thought about deleting this post. I do fear you will lose your membership card! Heretic! Never thought about using kefir. I'm embarrassed to say, I've never even tried making it. I guess I should be careful, or I might lose my prepper membership card!
Delete