Little Breads for Company #1: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 07:00AM Epicurious Recipe: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt
- Advanced Prep: Make biscuit dough rounds in advance and freeze the dough, bake on day-of.
- Method: Biscuit, obvs.
Since the majority of my rather minimal overall experience in the kitchen has been focused on desserts, you might think the transition to savory baking would be welcome, but it's not.
What I like about dessert baked goods is their cakiness. (Or, you know, their being actual cake.)
But what I generally like least in a savory baked good is cakiness. I want chewiness or crispness or flakiness.
And my assumption about the path to chewiness, crispness or flakiness has been that it is paved with Patience and Attention.
It requires a good "biscuit hand," or willingness to knead and knead and knead no matter how bored you are and how that boredom feels like being covered in fire ants that are as irritated with covering you as you are with kneading that damn dough.
So while the Bread Guy at the cooking school was one of my favorite teachers for entertainment value, I would always watch the students dutifully kneading, and think, "F that! I'll just buy the Bread Guy's bread at the store."
But I don't know. I guess I decided to try some biscuits.
I think mainly because I had some buttermilk on hand and needed to use up some self-rising flour that's ticking down to an expiration at the end of this year. I plugged those ingredients in Epicurious's search and found this recipe. It has the extra added bonus of using up the cornmeal that has also been languishing in the fridge.
What I hate about biscuit or pastry recipes are instructions like: "Add 1/2 cup chilled butter and rub in with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture and stir until moist clumps form."
"Coarse meal"? "Moist clumps"?
I was on a Kaypro at age 5. My mind works in zeros and ones. I don't know how to follow these kinds of directions. What is the diameter of a piece of coarse meal or a moist clump? What percentage of the mixture has to have that diameter, and, ergo, what percentage that looks different is acceptable? I get very Rain Man about this shit.
But I tried it, and I guess it seemed to work okay.
I'm making my own attempts to be more frugal, so I did resist the urge to buy a biscuit cutter and instead, used the can from some pineapple juice I already had on hand.
I made the dough, cut the rounds, and froze them per the instructions I found on the Modern Beet blog.
The first one I cooked from frozen tasted good and had a nice texture, or so I thought. I was less pleased with the ones I then baked on the night of Book Club. They still had a good flavor, but were less fluffy than I was expecting.
I have no idea if this is due to my being more ham-handed than biscuit-handed, the recipe not being as good as it could or the time in the freezer. I suspect user error is most likely culprit.
The flavor was very nice, though, with the tang of the buttermilk and scallions, the crunch of the cornmeal, and of course the lovely salt-and-peppery-ness of the whole thing. I think I will attempt these again to see if I can improve my part of the process, and see how that might improve the output.
If you are fortunate enough to already have a nice biscuit hand, I'd recommend giving them a go.
Reader Comments (3)
I notice that you didn't mention that the Grammar Checker on that Kaypro made you cry with its cold, uncaring, clinical dissection of your early attempts at prose. BUT, hey, it must have been worth the grief, 'cuz you sho' do writes good now!
No, I learned little (other than to be frustrated) and I think any grammar checker would still find my writing too clunky, chock full of clauses, asides and too-long sentences.
But ever since I heard about the studies of a group of nuns over their lifetime that showed that sentence complexity early in life is a sign of reduced risk of dementia, I decided I didn't care. Also, writing in a style that is "conceptually dense" might actually help ward off dementia. As the dude in the below link put it, "Strunk and White's stylistic advice may actually rot the brain. Well, at least it's correlated with neurodegenerative pathology, and might even cause it."
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001686.html
So I'm-a keep on keeping on with my too long sentences and Kaypros can beep at me, MS Word can put a little green squiggle under things, and Elements of Style can ruffle its pages in stylistic affront, but as long as I remain sharp as a tack into my dotage, I don't care.
Well, keep on doing what you're doing and let those sentences run on because if it's going to keep you sharp as the proverbial tack WITHOUT becoming a nun, which is to say there's nothing wrong with being a nun, because I've known a few in my day and some of them WERE sharp as a tack, while others had a nasty habit of smacking me about the head and shoulders for no reason at all except that just maybe I did talk back a few times but that was only because I thought the homework assignments were too hard and took so much time to complete that I completely missed "Ironsides" on TV, especially when he had those really tough cases involving Soviet spies,which I suppose we should call Russian spies now since . . . uh, like you said.