Ramp Drop Biscuits

 

Sometimes I wish we lived in the South (or at least closer to the South).  Then again, if we lived closer to good barbeque and biscuit sandwiches, I would probably weigh a good 5-10 pounds more.  So maybe that's not such a good idea.  Every once in awhile I get a little anxious for a good BBQ and/or biscuit fix.  I tried to convince Alex a few weeks ago that we should go to Chapel Hill for a weekend in June so I could eat pulled pork at Allen & Sons and biscuit sandwiches from Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen and Bojangles.  Alex shot me down.  But I convinced him to make ramp drop biscuits today and we bought a Fast Pass for Big Apple BBQ in early June, so I will have to make do.  I am generalizing a bit here, but drop biscuits tend to be less flaky and layered and more tender, with a nice crust.  In my opinion, they make really good biscuit sandwiches.  Alex prefers flaky biscuits, but drop biscuits are nice because they are quick to make and aren't as messy - if you're feeling lazy you can totally make them in your food processor or your stand mixer in a matter of minutes.  You don't have to cut in the butter by hand and then roll them out on a cutting board before cutting them with a cookie/biscuit cutter (which inevitably results in a huge mess and lots of wasted dough scraps).  These biscuits came together so quickly and so easily that I was halfway tempted to declare that we should only make drop biscuits from now on.  But there are times when I want a really flaky biscuit so that plan isn't going to work.  Ramp biscuits aren't for everyone - they leave an interesting lingering (somewhat garlicky) aftertaste.  I think these biscuits would make an excellent breakfast biscuits - some scrambled eggs and ham or bacon would work really nicely with the flavor and texture of the biscuits.

Recipe after the jump!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Scones and Pumpkin Buttermilk Biscuits

It occurred to me on Saturday that I hadn't baked anything in some time.  Since fall is finally here I knew exactly what I wanted to bake with!  So I went through the cupboard and found a can of pumpkin puree that I knew was in there (and have been saving).  Then I had to decide what to make.  I originally wanted to make some pumpkin whoopie pies with maple-flavored cream cheese frosting, but I didn't have everything I needed.  I thought about making pumpkin bread, but that seemed a little boring.  So I decided to bake some pumpkin scones and some pumpkin biscuits.  What can I say - I go a little crazy sometimes.  This is what happens when I haven't had time to bake in awhile.  

Out of these two recipes, both Alex and I preferred the scones.  I thought the combination of spices really worked and it came through very clearly, without being overpowering.  I also thought the crumb was nice - soft and crumbly, without being dry.  And I liked the crunchy sweetness of the turbinado sugar topping.  I think that bittersweet chocolate is perfect for these scones.  The bittersweet chocolate gave the scones a really nice deep, chocolatey flavor that worked really well with the pumpkin and the spices.  Semisweet chocolate would work too I guess, but I don't think I would use milk (or white) chocolate because it would be too sweet.  The biscuits couldn't seem to decide if they were supposed to be sweet or savory.  Topped with butter and honey they were pretty good, but we thought they needed more salt to both accentuate and balance out the sweetness of the honey and sugar in the biscuit batter.  And I thought the texture wasn't as flaky as I would have liked.  They almost seemed a little doughy and heavy in the centers, rather than flaky and light.  I'm thinking that I might not have mixed the batter as evenly as I could have.  Oops.  The blog where I found the recipe suggested serving them with butter, some bacon and a drizzle of maple syrup.  That might be enough to really make me love the biscuits, but I'm not there just yet.

Recipes after the jump!

Biscuit Fail

Alex was browsing CNN the other day and came across a new buttermilk biscuit recipe.  Only it's not a new recipe.  It showed up on the Homesick Texan blog back in 2007.  It's just a recipe that is new to us.  And it involved a technique new to us - beating your biscuits with a rolling pin.  According to Homesick Texan, before baking soda and baking powder cooks would beat their dough with a mallet or a rolling pin to make it rise.  Alex thought the technique was interesting enough to try it out.  So we did.  I got home from hot yoga (and was that an experience or what) and I was starving.  And I was seriously craving some biscuits.  I'm not sure what we did wrong here, but the biscuits didn't quite work out as planned.  I don't know if we beat the biscuits too much, or not enough.  Or if we overworked the dough in some other way.  But they weren't as light and fluffy as I had hoped they would be.  Actually, they were kind of dense.  There was no fluffiness whatsoever.  I'm sure it was our fault (or Alex's fault since he made the biscuits while I supervised) and not the recipe.  Oh well.  Better luck next time.  And for the record, I still ate three of them.  Haha.  I clearly have a problem.

Grandmother Walters's Biscuits and Homemade Honey Butter

If you couldn't tell by the number of different posts I have already on biscuits, I'm a little biscuit obsessed.  I have found some pretty amazing biscuits over the years.  My personal favorite (at the moment) is Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt.  But sometimes you want plain biscuits.  And I have yet to find a really good plain biscuit recipe.  All of the biscuit recipes that we have made and loved have involved cheese or scallions or something else to just give them that something extra.  But for Easter dinner we wanted a plain biscuit to serve with the ham our friends made.  So I pulled this recipe out of my file of recipes that I want to make.  I have been a little skeptical for some time about this recipe since it called for whole milk instead of buttermilk, but sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith.

These biscuits were really tender and buttery.  Rolling the dough over kind of like puff pastry also gave them lots of fluffy layers, although I felt like they were a little too tender to be as flaky as I would like.  They were a perfect blank canvas for whatever you wanted to pair them with.  I thought they were delicious with the honey butter (so delicious that after eating a few last night with dinner I had two of the leftover biscuits this morning with more butter).  As for the honey butter itself, I would serve it with biscuits (duh) or with cornbread.  It was pretty yummy.

Recipes after the jump!

Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper, and Sea Salt

I love biscuits.  It's a seriously Southern thing that I picked up at Chapel Hill while I was there and one I plan to never give up.  Unfortunately, good biscuits are much harder to find here in NYC than they were in North Carolina.  Actually, some might say that it's nearly impossible.  So I have taken to making my own whenever I have a serious biscuit craving.  The only problem that biscuit-making makes a mess.  And when you're me, it makes a HUGE mess. I should take pictures of the kitchen after I engage in a bout of biscuit-making.  Today for example, I ended up with floury hand prints on our olive oil cruet and bits of biscuit dough decorating the floor.  I'm nearly certain that I have ended up with flour in my hair at least once, which begs the question of what exactly I am doing while making my biscuits.  I wish I could tell you, but I can't.

Anyway, I love these biscuits.  Love, love, love them.  I have been saving the recipe for some time now, but I always forget to pick up self-rising flour.  Luckily, Alex picked some up to make his crazy Dutch cookies so this morning when I woke up this recipe was the first thing I thought about.  Actually, first I thought about pizza.  At about 10:00 am I told Alex that I wanted some pizza and he told me that I'm an idiot.  Isn't he sweet?  But the second thing I thought about was this biscuit recipe.  So I toddled into the kitchen in my pjs and I made my biscuits.  OMG.  They are delicious.  They have a perfect flaky, yet very tender texture typical of really good homemade buttermilk biscuits.  Nothing against Grands biscuits out of the can, but they're never quite as crisp on the outside, and yet flaky and tender on the inside.  Instead they're basically buttery and tender all the way through, which is nice and all, but they're certainly not buttermilk biscuits.  So the texture is amazing.  Actually, I think that's the first thing I told Alex after my first mouthful of biscuit.  That the texture was perfect.  And they have loads of flavor from the black pepper and the scallions.  That was the first thing Alex said.  They are absolutely gorgeous.  I think Alex has already eaten four whole biscuits, which is a huge testament to how delicious these biscuits are because he usually has one biscuit and calls it a day.  I think these biscuits could very well be the best biscuits that I have ever made.  And I don't say that lightly.


Recipe after the jump!

Buttermilk Biscuits

I have been on the search for the ultimate biscuit recipe for years.  There are a few that I have discovered that I really enjoy, but none of them are plain buttermilk biscuits.  Instead they usually involve the addition of cheese and other herbs or seasonings.  And as much as I love these fancied up biscuits, I am always trying to find the PERFECT biscuit recipe that I can make for any occasion and serve slathered with white sausage gravy, just as easily as in a bread basket with dinner.  Today I stumbled across this recipe and in my neverending hunt for the perfect biscuit I gave it a try.  

So this biscuit recipe falls somewhere between a scone and a sweet biscuit that you would use for making shortcakes.  It's definitely not the savory biscuit that I was planning on when I first started baking.  It's probably my fault for not thinking the recipe through more clearly.  All I saw was a biscuit recipe that was very simple and only included ingredients I already had in the kitchen.  I didn't stop to think about it further.  But had I stepped back and thought about it, I would have realized that any biscuit recipe that contains 1 1/2 tbsp of sugar and 1 tbsp of heavy cream brushed over the top of the biscuits would end up being more scone-like than biscuit-like.  So I might end up having the rest of these biscuits for breakfast slathered with jam and served alongside a cup of tea.  I think they will be delicious that way.  I also think that with a little extra sugar sprinkled on top that they would make a fantastic cobbler topping.  The hunt for the perfect biscuit continues...

Recipe after the jump!

Buttermilk Herb Gouda Biscuits

Since the Lee Bros. cook good Southern food, I thought what could be better with our salmon than some buttermilk biscuits?  So I sent Alex off to find us a new buttermilk biscuit recipe to try before remembering that I had a recipe for Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuits from Ina Garten's Back to Basics cookbook that I had been wanting to try.  So I guess you could say I cut him off at the pass and decided to use my own recipe, rather than anything he came up with.  We didn't have any cheddar to use for the biscuits, but I knew we had some herb gouda in the fridge that would work nicely in a biscuit so I used that instead.

These biscuits came out amazing.  Just like the cookbook says, they are light and flaky, but still moist.  The biscuits are buttery and fabulously cheesy.  If we had some extra sharp cheddar in the fridge I think the biscuits would have been a little, well, sharper, but the gloriously flaky texture and cheesy flavor still would have been fantastic.  Alex said that he prefers these biscuits to the Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits that we typically make because these biscuits have a more typically tender, flaky crumb, whereas the other biscuits use both cornmeal and flour and so they have a grittier crumb along with a crust that forms on the bottom of the biscuits themselves.  I agree with him as far as texture goes - these biscuits have that perfect, flaky biscuit texture that I grew to love at UNC.  However, I do like the combination of cheddar, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and scallions in the other biscuits.  So I think it's a tough decision (or at least a tougher decision than Alex found it to be).  But I agree with him that these biscuits come out on top.  You just can't beat that wonderful biscuit texture and taste.

Recipe after the jump!

Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits

I know that I have referenced this recipe before in my post on Cheddar Biscuits, but I made a fresh batch last night and just had to share the pictures (and the recipe) with you all again.  I had a thing of buttermilk in the fridge fast approaching its expiration date and when I realized that I had all of the ingredients for these biscuits I knew I had to make a batch.  I briefly considered making this recipe for Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt from Bon Appetit, but I didn't have any self-rising flour.  Maybe next time.  As I mentioned in my previous biscuit post, these biscuits do not have an overly traditional texture to them due to the addition of the cornmeal.  The cornmeal makes the crumb a little coarser and "grittier," although not in a bad way.  They just aren't quite as tender as a traditional buttermilk biscuit should be.  Instead they are wonderfully cheesy and savory, which is a trade-off that I am willing to make.  Alex and I think they are absolutely wonderful, but that's just us.  Let me know what you think!

Recipe after the jump!

Cheddar Biscuits

This morning I decided to try to make Cheddar Dill Biscuits (from Gourmet April 2009) instead of the Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits (from Gourmet, September 2004).  I decided that we might as well use up some of the dill we had leftover from the roast salmon we made last week, and why not try something new?  While my husband isn't thrilled by dill in general, he was game.  So we hit the local grocery, bought some fresh cheddar and made some biscuits. 

I have to admit that I was expecting a little more brightness from the dill, and a slightly saltier kick from the cheese.  But all in all, it was an interesting little biscuit.  I have to say that the Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits are still my favorites, but because of the addition of corn meal in the drop biscuits and the non-traditional texture they might not be for everyone.  The corn meal makes them a little crunchy/crusty on the bottoms and makes them a little less tender and more "toothsome."  However, they are gloriously cheesy and the addition of Parmigiano-Reggiano gives them a very nice salty kick.  The Cheddar Dill biscuits have a very nice, more traditional biscuit texture to them, but they just aren't quite as interesting.  After this experiment, I have to admit that I agree with my husband in the preference of scallion over dill for biscuits.  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the buttermilk biscuits, but the next time I make some I will make sure to take pictures for you guys.

Recipes for both after the jump!