Little Breads for Company #1: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions

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.

Tomorrow: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

I am a one-trick pony and that trick is: more zest.

Remember the end of The Usual Suspects when the cop looks around himself and sees all the little details Kevin Spacey had been weaving into his tale of Keyser Soze?  It rapidly dawns on the cop just what had been going on.

I just had a similar moment re-reading some entries on this blog.  I was looking back over some successful recipes and kept reading the same thing “I used more zest…” “I upped the zest…” 

It’s just zest. 

That’s like the one thing I got.  If a recipe calls for zest, I use more zest.   If a recipe doesn’t call for zest but seems like it could use some brightening, I whip out the Microplane.

(Precious)

When I was making the Lemony-Semolina Cookies with my friends Carolyn and Will, I brought my Microplane with me down to their house, just in case they didn’t have the best tool for the job. 

Carolyn said, off-hand, that if a recipe calls for zest, she usually just skips that ingredient, and I was aghast.  I had to save her from her own faulty thinking!  So I launched into my usual style of dorky over-enthusiastic evangelism.  She stopped me, incredulous, and asked, “Did you just actually say, ‘Zest is best’?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, “I did!  Because it is!”

So it’s not exactly a surprise to see how often I use it as my secret weapon, but still I sort of thought I had like more than just that one in my arsenal.

Remember Smell-O-Vision?

Or John Water’s version of it, “Odorama”?

No?  Well, me neither I guess, but I remember hearing about Smell-O-Vision, which was, as Wikipedia puts it, “a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could 'smell' what was happening in the movie.”

And it’s just a tragedy this never caught on, because I can’t even count how many times I’ve been watching a movie and thought to myself: If only I could CATCH A WHIFF of what that character is smelling, THEN I would really be able to understand the pathos of this scene.

Anyhoodle, so I had referenced over the holidays that I was awaiting the arrival of The! Most! Highly! Anticipated! package (containing a kitchen appliance that is NOT an ice cream maker) of the entire holiday season but then got all distracted by other activities to actually circle back and say what the mysterious kitchen appliance actually is. 

Fellow food-lover Kayko reminded me in the comments that I hadn’t actually closed the loop on that one.

Well, I’m not gonna just yet, because actually The! Most! Highly! Anticipated! package of the holiday season is a key element to The! Most! Highly! Not-Anticipated! Useless Self-Imposed Blog Project of the year and so I am going to have to save it until I roll that puppy out sometime later this month.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of smelling-to-see a la Smell-O-Vision, here is some...hearing-to-taste...um, shall we call it Audi-O-Flava.  Click on Craig Mack below to hear a little MP3 sonic clue about the appliance (it might be quiet and will need to be turned up).  This is the actual sound it is supposed to make. It’s not broken.

 

Setting Up the Kitchen to Cook, or, Cooking with ADD

One of the things that has held me back from cooking more often is a kind of ADD exacerbated by a multiplicity of objects and disorder.  Visual overstimulation.  It feels like I lose at least one-half of an IQ point for every object in my immediate view.  Don’t know why, but that’s how it is.

It’s why I feel like my brain turns to goo when driving (so! many! things! whizzing! by! at high speed!) and also why most of my friends think I’m hyper-organized.  I mean, I am hyper-organized, what they sometimes don’t understand is it’s not stemming from some kind of tidy saintliness (ask my parents, they’ll vouch for an utter lack of innate tidiness), rather it’s a coping mechanism, a trick I’ve developed to help keep my foggy-brain-time to a minimum. 

I actually lose much much less time sorting magazine clippings into Martha-Stewart-esque binders than I would lose lost in the confused inertia of being surrounded by unorganized piles.  Because of course ADD also means that I seek out the stimulation of lots and lots of stuff and ideas and things…but over the years, I’ve developed a balancing act to help me spend less time in an overstimulated mouthbreathing waking coma.

But cooking!  Lord!  All the stuff. The equipment and the ingredients and the detritus of the ingredients and the different places to put the detritus and the washing up and the drying and the putting away in the right spot.  So many items!!  Brain hurts!!  I’m just going to go lie down midway through making this cake…

For years, the cooking process has been one giant battle ground between my nature and the self-nurture I developed to deal with my nature.  And what I’ve decided works is succumbing utterly to my coping mechanism, suppressing my slapdash and impatient nature, and being totally, utterly, and yes, some would say even anally ordered about how I set myself up to cook.

Structure is beautiful.  Structure and routine, I believe, free up your mind from processing the minutiae and allow those precious neurons to fire about more important things, like finding creative solutions, noticing small details, and,  basically (not to get all Zen on your noggin) being present in the moment.  That might seem counterintuitive, but if you make all your small decisions in advance, you can actually be more open and receptive to making big decisions in the moment.

Between these thoughts, and the tricks I’ve picked up from watching many chefs in action at the cooking school I’m working at, I’ve developed a pretty solid set-up that has been making the cooking process a complete pleasure lately. 

And so when doing my marathon cooking session this week, I took some pics and thought I’d outline what I’ve come up with.  None of it is going to be earth-shatteringly novel, but if, like me, sometimes you feel like cooking is a big chaotic process and you feel discouraged from dealing with the mess, these are some things to maybe try to help make it more pleasant and efficient...click through under picture for the details...

 

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