mediaphage posted:

Great post!!

I'm glad you like your biscuits but I honestly I don't like using lard in biscuits or pie crusts; the tradeoffs in flavour, for me, aren't worth it. If you keep your butter ice cold and minimally work the dough, I don't find they get tough, but to each their own.

There are lots of ways to approach biscuits (some use cast iron, etc), but I have settled on a simple method that's quick to pound out for weekend lazy breakfasts, most of the time:

2c flour
6 - 8T butter (depending)
3tsp baking powder
1/2tsp baking soda
1c buttermilk
salt to taste

Preheat oven to 425F or 450F.

Mix dry, cut in the butter. Like with pie dough, the key is to keep the butter cold while you work. If you like fluffy biscuits, bring the dough together, pat it out into a rough rectangle, and cut it into 8 squarish pieces. If you like really layer-y biscuits, add more butter and do a few laminations like you might with viennoiserie dough. Then proceed as above. If you like drop biscuits, add another half cup of buttermilk and scoop up rough tablespoons that you push off onto a baking sheet.

I find that biscuits are pretty sensitive to working the dough (especially because I end up using canadian AP flour most of the time, which is pretty hard), so once the dough barely comes together, I turn it out and pat it into a rectangle, then cut. For maximum lift you can trim off a millimetre from every edge but honestly most of the time I don't bother. If you do, you can combine the edge into a single mutant biscuit (using round is traditional but then it leaves you with all this extra dough you have to handle in order to make more biscuits, so I stick to squares).

If you like red lobster like biscuits, make the drop biscuit variant, add a cup of shredded cheese, a half teaspoon of garlic powder, and some chopped herbs.